from American Political Science Review
The Structure of Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution
Noam Lupu and Joans Pontusson
Against the current consensus among comparative political economists, we argue that inequality matters for redistributive politics in advanced capitalist societies, but it is the structure of inequality, not the level of inequality, that matters. Our theory posits that middle-income voters will be inclined to ally with low-income voters and support redistributive policies when the distance between the middle and the poor is small relative to the distance between the middle and the rich. We test this proposition with data from 15 to 18 advanced democracies and find that both redistribution and nonelderly social spending increase as the dispersion of earnings in the upper half of the distribution increases relative to the dispersion of earnings in the lower half of the distribution. In addition, we present survey evidence on preferences for redistribution among middle-income voters that is consistent with our theory and regression results indicating that left parties are more likely to participate in government when the structure of inequality is characterized by skew.
from British Journal of Political Science
Language and Ideology in Congress
Daniel Diermeier, Jean-François Godbout, Bei Yu and Stefan Kaufmann
Legislative speech records from the 101st to 108th Congresses of the US Senate are analysed to study political ideologies. A widely-used text classification algorithm – Support Vector Machines (SVM) – allows the extraction of terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions in legislative speeches and the prediction of senators’ ideological positions, with a 92 per cent level of accuracy. Feature analysis identifies the terms associated with conservative and liberal ideologies. The results demonstrate that cultural references appear more important than economic references in distinguishing conservative from liberal congressional speeches, calling into question the common economic interpretation of ideological differences in the US Congress.
Casualties and Incumbents: Do the Casualties from Interstate Conflicts Affect Incumbent Party Vote Share?
Michael T. Koch
Research suggests that the costs of international conflict (e.g. casualties) alter public opinion, executive approval and policy positions of elected officials. However, do casualties affect voting in terms of aggregate outcomes and individual vote choices? This article examines how casualties from interstate conflicts affect voter behaviour, specifically incumbent vote share. Using the investment model of commitment to model individual vote choice, it is argued that increases in the costs of conflict (i.e., more casualties) can increase the probability that voters will support the incumbent, increasing incumbent vote share. This model is tested with both cross-national aggregate data from twenty-three countries and individual-level British survey data. The results support the argument.
Ideological Hedging in Uncertain Times: Inconsistent Legislative Representation and Voter Enfranchisement
Antoine Yoshinaka and Christian R. Grose
Can ideological inconsistency in legislators’ voting records be explained by uncertainty about constituent preferences? Do legislators ‘hedge their bets’ ideologically when faced with constituency uncertainty? This article presents an uncertainty-based theory of ideological hedging. Legislators faced with uncertainty about their constituent preferences have an incentive to present ideologically inconsistent roll-call records. Legislators experiment with a variety of roll-call positions in order to learn the preferences of their constituents. An examination of US senators during 1961-2004 shows that uncertainty due to black enfranchisement and mobilization led to higher ideological inconsistency in legislative voting records. Ideologically inconsistent behaviour by elected officials can be characterized as best responses to a changing and uncertain environment. These results have implications for representation and the stability of democracy.
from The Journal of Politics
A Jamming Theory of Politics
William Minozzi
Competitive political elites frequently offer conflicting, irreconcilable accounts of policy-relevant information. This presents a problem for members of the public who lack the skill, time, and attention to become experts on every complicated policy question that might arise. To analyze problems like these, this article presents a formal theory of political communication with competitive senders who have privately known preferences. In equilibrium, senders can jam messages from their opponents; that is, they can send messages designed to leave receivers uncertain about who has sent a truthful message. The article identifies differences between jamming and existing theories, reports empirical predictions, and discusses substantive implications for the politics of representation, the judiciary, and expertise.
Is the Government to Blame? An Experimental Test of How Partisanship Shapes Perceptions of Performance and Responsibility
James Tilleya and Sara B. Hobolt
The idea that voters use elections to hold governments to account for their performance lies at the heart of democratic theory, and countless studies have shown that economic performance can predict support for incumbents. Nonetheless recent work has challenged this simple link between policy performance and party choice by arguing that any relationship is conditioned by prior political beliefs, notably partisanship. Some have argued that economic perceptions are shaped by party choice rather than vice versa. Others have claimed that voters tend to attribute responsibility for perceived successes to their favored party, but absolve them of responsibility if performance is poor. This study examines the effect of partisanship on both performance evaluations and responsibility attributions using survey experiments to disentangle the complex causal relationships. Our findings show that partisan loyalties have pervasive effects on responsibility attributions, but somewhat weaker effects on evaluations of performance.
Election Timing and the Electoral Influence of Interest Groups
Sarah F. Anzia
It is an established fact that off-cycle elections attract lower voter turnout than on-cycle elections. I argue that the decrease in turnout that accompanies off-cycle election timing creates a strategic opportunity for organized interest groups. Members of interest groups with a large stake in an election outcome turn out at high rates regardless of election timing, and their efforts to mobilize and persuade voters have a greater impact when turnout is low. Consequently, policy made by officials elected in off-cycle elections should be more favorable to the dominant interest group in a polity than policy made by officials elected in on-cycle elections. I test this theory using data on school district elections in the United States, in which teacher unions are the dominant interest group. I find that districts with off-cycle elections pay experienced teachers over 3% more than districts that hold on-cycle elections.
Does Knowledge of Constitutional Principles Increase Support for Civil Liberties? Results from a Randomized Field Experiment

Donald P. Green, Peter M. Aronow, Daniel E. Bergan, Pamela Greene, Celia Paris and Beth I. Weinberger
For decades, scholars have argued that education causes greater support for civil liberties by increasing students’ exposure to political knowledge and constitutional norms, such as due process and freedom of expression. Support for this claim comes exclusively from observational evidence, principally from cross-sectional surveys. This paper presents the first large-scale experimental test of this proposition. More than 1000 students in 59 high school classrooms were randomly assigned to an enhanced civics curriculum designed to promote awareness and understanding of constitutional rights and civil liberties. The results show that students in the enhanced curriculum classes displayed significantly more knowledge in this domain than students in conventional civics classes. However, we find no corresponding change in the treatment group’s support for civil liberties, a finding that calls into question the hypothesis that knowledge and attitudes are causally connected.
Drafting Support for War: Conscription and Mass Support for Warfare

Michael C. Horowitz and Matthew S. Levendusky
How does a military’s recruitment policy–whether a country has a draft or conscript army–influence mass support for war? We investigate how military recruitment affects the way the American public evaluates whether a war is worth fighting. While some argue that conscription decreases support for war by making its costs more salient, others argue that it increases support by signaling the importance of the conflict. Existing evidence is inconclusive, with data limited to one particular conflict. Using an original survey experiment, we find strong support for the argument that conscription decreases mass support for war, a finding that replicates in several different settings. We also show that these findings are driven by concerns about self-interest, consistent with our theory. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these findings for debates about how domestic political conditions influence when states go to war.
“Don’t Know” Means “Don’t Know”: DK Responses and the Public’s Level of Political Knowledge
Robert C. Luskin and John G. Bullock
Does the public know much more about politics than conventionally thought? A number of studies have recently argued, on various grounds, that the “don’t know” (DK) and incorrect responses to traditionally designed and scored survey knowledge items conceal a good deal of knowledge. This paper examines these claims, focusing on the prominent and influential argument that discouraging DKs would reveal a substantially more knowledgeable public. Using two experimental surveys with national random samples, we show that discouraging DKs does little to affect our picture of how much the public knows about politics. For closed-ended items, the increase in correct responses is large but mainly illusory. For open-ended items, it is genuine but minor. We close by examining the other recent evidence for a substantially more knowledgeable public, showing that it too holds little water.
The Effects of Identities, Incentives, and Information on Voting

Anna Bassi, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams
We report on majority voting experiments where subjects are randomly assigned identities in common with a candidate. However, subjects sometimes receive a financial incentive from voting contrary to their identity. We vary the size of the incentive as well as information voters have about the advantage of the incentive. We find that subjects are influenced by their assigned identities, and the effect is stronger when voters have less information. Nevertheless, financial incentives reduce this influence when voters have full information. Our results suggest that identity may have an important affect on voter choices in elections where incentives or information are low.
Testing the Double Standard for Candidate Emotionality: Voter Reactions to the Tears and Anger of Male and Female Politicians
Deborah Jordan Brooks
Many have speculated that voters hold double standards for male and female political candidates that disadvantage women. One common assumption is that female candidates are penalized disproportionately for displays of crying and anger; however, the field lacks a theoretical or empirical foundation for examining this matter. The first half of this article establishes the theoretical basis for how emotional displays are likely to influence evaluations of female versus male candidates. Using a large-N, representative sample of U.S. adults, the second half tests these dynamics experimentally. The main finding is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, no double standard exists for emotionality overall: male and female candidates are similarly penalized for both anger and crying. There are, however, different responses to the tears of male and female candidates depending on whether the respondent is a man or woman.
from Political Behavior
The Ideological Effects of Framing Threat on Immigration and Civil Liberties
Assuming that migration threat is multi-dimensional, this article seeks to investigate how various types of threats associated with immigration affect attitudes towards immigration and civil liberties. Through experimentation, the study unpacks the ‘securitization of migration’ discourse by disaggregating the nature of immigration threat, and its impact on policy positions and ideological patterns at the individual level. Based on framing and attitudinal analysis, we argue that physical security in distinction from cultural insecurity is enough to generate important ideological variations stemming from strategic input (such as framing and issue-linkage). We expect then that as immigration shifts from a cultural to a physical threat, immigration issues may become more politically salient but less politicized and subject to consensus. Interestingly, however, the findings reveal that the effects of threat framing are not ubiquitous, and may be conditional upon ideology. Liberals were much more susceptible to the frames than were conservatives. Potential explanations for the ideological effects of framing, as well as their implications, are explored.
The Consequences of Political Cynicism: How Cynicism Shapes Citizens’ Reactions to Political Scandals
Logan Dancey
This paper argues cynicism toward elected officials colors how individuals in the mass public interpret information about political scandals. Specifically, citizens rely on prior levels of cynicism toward elected officials when assessing new information about potential political malfeasance. Drawing on panel data surrounding two prominent political scandals, this paper demonstrates prior levels of cynicism shape individuals’ interpretations of information about scandals, but cynicism does not affect the amount of attention individuals pay to scandals. Ultimately, the results shed light on individual-level variation in response to scandals, and suggest expressed cynicism toward politicians is a politically consequential individual-level attitude that affects whether or not political leaders can survive ethical transgressions.
Personality and Political Participation: The Mediation Hypothesis

Aina Gallego and Daniel Oberski
Recent analyses have demonstrated that personality affects political behavior. According to the mediation hypothesis, the effect of personality on political participation is mediated by classical predictors, such as political interest, internal efficacy, political discussion, or the sense that voting is a civic duty. This paper outlines various paths that link personality traits to two participatory activities: voter turnout in European Parliament elections and participation in protest actions. The hypotheses are tested with data from a large, nationally representative, face-to-face survey of the Spanish population conducted before and after the 2009 European Parliament elections using log-linear path models that are well suited to study indirect relationships. The results clearly confirm that the effects of personality traits on voter turnout and protest participation are sizeable but indirect. They are mediated by attitudinal predictors.
Justifying Party Identification: A Case of Identifying with the “Lesser of Two Evils”

Eric Groenendyk
Despite the centrality of party identification to our understanding of political behavior, there remains remarkable disagreement regarding its nature and measurement. Most scholars agree that party identities are quite stable relative to attitudes. But do partisans defend their identities, or does this stability result from Bayesian learning? I hypothesize that partisans defend their identities by generating “lesser of two evils” justifications. In other words, partisan identity justification occurs in multidimensional attitude space. This also helps to explain the weak relationship between attitudes toward the two parties observed by proponents of multidimensional partisanship. I test this hypothesis in an experiment designed to evoke inconsistency between one’s party identity and political attitudes. To establish generalizability, I then replicate these results through aggregate level analysis of data from the ANES.

from PS: Political Science & Politics
The 2010 Elections: Why Did Political Science Forecasts Go Awry?
David W. Brady, Morris P. Fiorina and Arjun S. Wilkins
In President Obama’s words, the Democratic Party experienced a “shellacking” in the 2010 elections. In particular, the net loss of 63 House seats was the biggest midterm loss suffered by a party since 1938–the largest in the lifetimes of approximately 93% of the American population.
Affective Forecasting Errors in the 2008 Election: Underpredicting Happiness
Catherine J. Norris, Amanda G. Dumville and Dean P. Lacy
Individuals tend to be very bad at predicting their emotional responses to future events, often overestimating both the intensity and duration of their responses, particularly to negative events. The authors studied affective forecasting errors in the 2008 election in a large sample of undergraduates at Dartmouth College. Replicating past research, McCain supporters overpredicted their negative affect in response to the (future) election of Barack Obama. Obama supporters, however, underpredicted their happiness in response to his victory. Results are discussed with reference to mechanisms proposed to underlie the impact bias, as well as the unique circumstances surrounding this historic election season.
The Political Relevance of Emotions: “Reassessing” Revisited
Ted Brader
Ladd and Lenz (2008) question a central claim of affective intelligence theory (AIT), namely that anxiety affects political judgments indirectly by reducing the role of predispositions and increasing the role of contemporary information. They claim that alternative hypotheses, especially the notion that emotions are simply rationalizations of political preferences, better explain the role of emotion in politics. Their ultimate conclusions, however, rest on an overly narrow view of both theory and evidence. Even if one accepts Ladd and Lenz’s reanalysis of survey data, there is insufficient evidence to cast aside either AIT or the hypothesis that anxiety affects the mode of political judgment. AIT explains a broad range of political relationships that are unchallenged by the reassessment and which cannot be explained by the offered alternatives. Moreover, numerous experimental studies reject the alternative explanations in favor of an exogenous, often interactive role for anxiety. AIT will surely require amendment, if not abandonment, someday. Competing theories of emotion already exist and, unlike the alternative championed by Ladd and Lenz, these theories too suggest a meaningful role for emotion in political judgment and behavior. For now, given all of the research to date, AIT is a robust competitor, scarcely in need of being “salvaged.” Burgeoning research on the political relevance of emotions will benefit from further debates, replications, and extensions, as long as new claims and evidence are put in proper perspective.
Does Anxiety Improve Voters’ Decision Making?
Jonathan McDonald Ladd and Gabriel S. Lenz
Affective Intelligence (AI) theory proposes to answer a fundamental question about democracy: how it succeeds even though most citizens pay little attention to politics. AI contends that, when circumstances generate sufficient anxiety, citizens make informed and thoughtful political decisions. In Ladd and Lenz (2008), we showed that two simpler depictions of anxiety’s role can explain the vote interactions that apparently support AI. Here, we again replicate Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen’s (2000)’s voting model, which they contend supports AI, and again show that it is vulnerable to these alternative explanations, regardless of how candidate choice is measured. We also briefly review the broader literature and discuss Brader’s (2005, 2006) important experimental results. Although the literature undoubtedly supports other aspects of AI, few studies directly test AI’s voting claims, which were the focus of our reassessment. In our view, the only study that does so while ruling out the two alternatives is our analysis of the 1980 ANES Major Panel (Ladd & Lenz, 2008), which finds no support for AI, but ample support for the alternatives. None of the responses to Ladd and Lenz (2008) addresses these findings. Overall, evidence that anxiety helps solve the problem of voter competence remains sparse and vulnerable to alternative explanations.
The Salience of the Democratic Congress and the 2010 Elections
David R. Jones and Monika L. McDermott
The results of the 2010 congressional elections were indeed historic. The loss of 63 seats by the Democrats was the biggest electoral loss by any party since 1948, making the more recent 1994 and 2006 turnovers pale by comparison. The question that political scientists naturally ask after an event of this magnitude is–why? This article addresses this question by analyzing the role played by the public’s attitudes toward Congress.
Participant Observation and the Political Scientist: Possibilities, Priorities, and Practicalities
Andra Gillespie and Melissa R. Michelson
Surveys, experiments, large-N datasets and formal models are common instruments in the political scientist’s toolkit. In-depth interviews and focus groups play a critical role in helping scholars answer important political questions. In contrast, participant observation techniques are an underused methodological approach. In this article, we argue that participant observation techniques have played and should continue to play a key role in advancing our understanding of political science. After demonstrating the use of these techniques, we offer readers advice for embarking upon participant observation research and explain how this approach should fit into a scholar’s long-term career plans.
The Political Scientist as a Blogger
John Sides
In November 2007, I helped found a blog, The Monkey Cage, with two of my colleagues, David Park and Lee Sigelman. This site joined a nascent political science blogosphere that is now composed of at least 80 blogs (Farrell and Sides 2010). The goals of The Monkey Cage are to publicize political science research and use this research to comment on current events. Although blogging is a promising way for scholars to promote their work to a larger audience, political scientists have been slow to take up this medium. To be sure, blogging is not without its challenges, particularly in terms of the time and energy needed to maintain a site. But blogging can also have its benefits by not only helping political science reach a broader audience, but also aiding individual scholars’ research, teaching, and service goals.
The Political Scientist as Local Campaign Consultant
Robert E. Crew Jr.
During my 45 years as an academic, I have followed the admonition sometimes attributed to the legendary Jedi warrior Obi-Wan Kenobe that political scientists should “use [their] power for good and not for evil.” In this spirit, I have devoted substantial portions of my career to public service by providing strategic advice and campaign management to candidates for small state and local elective offices–state legislature, county commission, city clerk or treasurer, school board, and the like–and supporters of citizen ballot initiatives. These campaigns generally cannot afford the professional campaign assistance that is now virtually a necessity for winning elections at all levels of government.
Expect Confrontation, Not Compromise: The 112th House of Representatives Is Likely to Be the Most Conservative and Polarized House in the Modern Era
Alan I. Abramowitz
An examination of the results of the recent midterm elections indicates that the new House of Representatives will probably be the most conservative and ideologically polarized House since the end of World War II. Republicans will hold 242 seats after a net gain of 63 seats, constituting the largest Republican majority in the House of Representatives since the 80th Congress (1947-49), which also had 242 Republican members.
Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections
Christopher F. Karpowitz, J. Quin Monson, Kelly D. Patterson and Jeremy C. Pope
By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, governed. The stimulus package and its impact on the federal debt caused unease in a segment of the electorate that was concerned with the size of government. In this context, observers of American politics began to take note of the number of citizens affiliating with, or at least expressing favorability toward, a loose coalition of groups known as the Tea Party movement. Tea Party rallies began to occur throughout the United States, seeking to draw attention to the movement’s primary issues.
The 2010 Midterm Elections: Signs and Portents for the Decennial Redistricting
Michael P. McDonald
The 2010 midterm elections are consequential not only in terms of the candidates who were elected to office, but also in terms of the government policies that they will enact. High on the list of important policies is the decennial practice of drawing new redistricting plans for legislative offices. A new census reveals population shifts that will result in a reallocation of congressional seats among the states through apportionment and–following U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s–a re-balancing of congressional and state legislative district populations within states that aims to give fast-growing areas more representation and slow-growing areas less. Of course, much more than an innocuous administrative adjustment occurs during the process of redistricting. The individuals who draw districts are keenly aware that district lines may affect the fortunes of incumbents, political parties, and minority voters’ candidates of choice.
Voter Turnout in the 2010 Congressional Midterm Elections
Costas Panagopoulos
Against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election, a watershed event in terms of electoral participation, many speculated that renewed interest in voting would spill over into the 2010 cycle, resulting in a meaningful uptick in voter turnout in the midterm elections overall. Turnout was expected to be especially robust among Republicans eager to regain their numbers in 2010, capitalizing on Democratic withdrawal fueled by voters’ frustration with President Obama, congressional Democrats, and the struggling economy. In 2008, an electorate energized around an historic contest and unprecedented levels of voter mobilization helped to drive more citizens to the polls on Election Day than ever before (Panagopoulos and Francia 2009). An estimated 131.1 million Americans voted for president, representing 61.6% of the eligible voting population (McDonald 2009). Voter turnout among eligible voters in 2008 was 1.5 percentage points higher than in 2004, when 122.3 million voters participated in the presidential election (Bergan et al. 2005). The 2008 election thus marked the third consecutive presidential election cycle in which voter turnout increased, reversing a trend of declining participation that began in the 1960s (McDonald 2009). In fact, national turnout in recent presidential elections has rivaled modern highs in the level of electoral participation that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
Democrats in Split-Outcome Districts and the 2010 Elections
Jeffrey M. Stonecash
The 2008 congressional elections produced a House in which 84 members came from split-outcome districts. Forty-nine Democrats won in districts that Barack Obama lost, and 35 Republicans won in districts that Obama won. To protect their majority, the Democrats needed to retain these 49 members. Given the party’s 257 seats, these split members constituted the difference between being in the majority and the minority. The 49 Democrats faced the dilemma of whether to vote with their party, given that their district voted for the presidential candidate of the other party. The focus here is on these split Democrats: their electoral situation, their votes, and their fate in 2010.
More than a Dime’s Worth: Using State Party Platforms to Assess the Degree of American Party Polarization
Daniel J. Coffey
How polarized are American political parties? Recently, Kidd used an automated content analysis program to demonstrate that American party platforms reveal only minor policy differences. In contrast to his conclusions, this analysis produces three main findings. First, at the state level, state party platforms reveal considerable ideological differences between the parties. Second, differences in state public opinion do not account for these differences; rather, they are more closely correlated with activist opinions and increases in state party competition. Finally, the conflict is not simply ideological but applies to specific issues in the platforms. As such, American state parties are highly polarized on different measures. Automated content analysis programs clearly represent an important methodological advance in coding political texts, but the results here call attention to the importance of policy and agenda content in party platforms. Moreover, studies of American politics, particularly research focusing on parties and ideological polarization, need to take into account the diversity of agendas that is inherent in a federal party system.
Wikipedia as a Data Source for Political Scientists: Accuracy and Completeness of Coverage
Adam R. Brown
In only 10 years, Wikipedia has risen from obscurity to become the dominant information source for an entire generation. However, any visitor can edit any page on Wikipedia, which hardly fosters confidence in its accuracy. In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia’s coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omission are extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia’s political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics.
from Political Psychology
Physical Attractiveness and Candidate Evaluation: A Model of Correction
William Hart, Victor C. Ottati and Nathaniel D. Krumdick
Voters typically evaluate an attractive candidate more favorably than an (otherwise equivalent) unattractive candidate. However, some voters “correct” for the biasing influence of physical appearance. This reduces, eliminates, or even reverses the physical attractiveness effect. Correction occurs when political experts evaluate a political candidate under nondistracting conditions. Under these “high cognitive capacity” conditions, voters primarily correct for physical unattractiveness. However, correction fails to occur when voters possess low levels of expertise or are distracted. Thus, in most circumstances, attractive candidates are evaluated more favorably than unattractive candidates. Two experiments provide support for this model of appearance-based candidate evaluation.
An Exploration of the Content of Stereotypes of Black Politicians
Monica C. Schneider and Angela L. Bos
Do voters have the same stereotypes of Black politicians that they have of Black people in general? We argue that common stereotypes of Blacks (e.g., lazy, violent) may not apply to perceptions of Black politicians. Instead, we hypothesize that Black politicians are a unique subtype of the larger group Blacks, different enough to warrant their own stereotypes. We take an inductive approach to understanding the stereotypes of Black politicians. Employing a classic psychology research design (Katz & Braly, 1933) in which respondents list traits for a target group, we find that there is little overlap of stereotype content between Black politicians and Blacks. Our results therefore indicate that Black politicians constitute a separate and unique subtype of Blacks. Our analysis explores similarities and differences between stereotypes of Black politicians and two other groups: Black professionals (another subtype of Blacks) and politicians. We discuss the implications of our findings for the relationship between stereotypes and voter decisions.
from The Forum
The Media Game: New Moves, Old Strategies
Shanto Iyengar
Campaigns are strategic contests between candidates and reporters. While candidates have proven to be adept at gaming news coverage of their campaign advertisements, journalists have maintained their autonomy by curtailing coverage of the candidates’ stump speeches. The advent of online media, however, advantages the candidates by permitting direct communication between candidates and voters.
How Political Science Can Help Journalism (and Still Let Journalists Be Journalists)
Brendan Nyhan and John Sides
Political scientists frequently lament the media’s neglect of our research. Although reporters should have a basic understanding of the field, it is not reasonable to expect them to restate the conclusions of academic research on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not always clear how research findings apply within the conventions of political journalism, which is context-specific and episodic in nature. In this article, we propose an approach that would bring more political science to journalism while respecting the professional norms and organizational constraints of news organizations. Although academic research is not always conducive to the demands of the news cycle, political science provides a novel perspective that could improve reporting in five respects: putting episodic developments in a structural context; providing new angles on the news; countering spin about the effects of events by elites; better describing historical trends and comparisons; and identifying known unknowns in politics.
Challenges to Mainstream Journalism in Baseball and Politics
Greg Marx
The increasing acceptance of “sabermetric” perspectives by sports media outlets provides a useful framework to think about the relationship between political science and political journalism. In many ways, the experience in the sports world, in which the conventional journalistic narrative proved flexible enough to accommodate quantitative methods and new analytical frameworks, represents an optimistic model for those who hope to see political reporting become more informed by scholarly research. On the other hand, there are important differences between the two cases. For example, political science poses a much larger challenge to the prevailing approach among journalists to everyday reporting than sabermetrics did. For this reason, it have the field may have less influence on practicing journalists than its supporters hope.
Promoting Policy in a Mediated Democracy: Congress and the News
Christine DeGregorio
Whose interests do major news dailies serve when they report on policy debates in Congress? This study compares what members of the U.S. House of Representatives say about major policy with what is later reported in two news dailies: one liberal (Washington Post) and one conservative (Washington Times). The data include one-minute floor speeches by House members (168) and published stories–news and editorials–in the print media (117). Three high-profile policy initiatives of the 107th Congress (2001-2002) anchor the investigation: No Child Left Behind Act (HR 1), Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (HR 1836), and Airport Security Act (S. 1447). The evidence shows a discrepancy in the perspectives between reporters and officeholders. Where news coverage stresses talk of the president and the process, lawmakers stress the problem and the stakes for the American people. When the debate breaks along party lines, news coverage shows a weak ideological bias that favors Democrats.
Polarized Populism: Masses, Elites, and Partisan Conflict
Paul J. Quirk
Scholars offer differing accounts of the roles played by political elites, on the one hand, and ordinary citizens, on the other, in the highly polarized partisan conflict of contemporary American politics. Some take polarized elite conflict to indicate, in itself, that elected policymakers have escaped the constraints of democratic control and act essentially independently. In sharp contrast to this view, I outline a case for the importance of what I call polarized populism–a condition of politics in which elected officials accord very substantial deference to ordinary citizens, especially those who hold relatively extreme ideological views. I clarify the differences between elite centered and populist accounts of polarized policymaking, and then develop the argument for polarized populism, presenting theoretical considerations in support and assessing several kinds of relevant evidence. I also reply to some claims by Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, proponents of the elite-centered view, in an earlier exchange in the Forum. In concluding, I comment briefly about some directions for research to assess the case for polarized populism and discuss some broader implications of this pattern of policymaking.
Advancing a Social Policy Agenda through Economic Policy: Obama’s Stimulus and Education Reform
M. Stephen Weatherford and Lorraine M. McDonnell
In using parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a down payment on an ambitious education reform agenda, Barack Obama has accomplished what few others presidents have. The strategy has given his administration three distinct advantages: a large discretionary funding source with little Congressional scrutiny; flexibility in pursuing education reform goals without crowding out other policies on the president’s agenda; and the ability to shape the national reform discussion for more than a year on the administration’s terms, without being constrained by negotiations over a specific piece of legislation. Now the question is whether the Obama administration’s political dexterity can be matched by skill in fashioning institutional arrangements that ensure the long-term sustainability of these reforms.
The Economic Records of the Presidents: Party Differences and Inherited Economic Conditions
James E. Campbell
Several studies of the post-war American political economy find that Democratic presidents have been more successful than Republicans. Most recently, Bartels (2008) found that economic growth had been greater and that unemployment and income inequality had been lower under Democratic presidents since 1948. If true, these findings combined with the frequent success of Republicans in presidential elections pose a challenge to theories of retrospective voting and responsible party government. This reexamination of these findings indicates that they are an artifact of specification error. Previous estimates did not properly take into account the lagged effects of the economy. Once lagged economic effects are taken into account, party differences in economic performance are shown to be the effects of economic conditions inherited from the previous president and not the consequence of real policy differences. Specifically, the economy was in recession when Republican presidents became responsible for the economy in each of the four post-1948 transitions from Democratic to Republican presidents. This was not the case for the transitions from Republicans to Democrats. When economic conditions leading into a year are taken into account, there are no presidential party differences with respect to growth, unemployment, or income inequality.
from Political Behavior
When Do the Ends Justify the Means? Evaluating Procedural Fairness
David Doherty and Jennifer Wolak
How do people decide whether a political process is fair or unfair? Concerned about principles of justice, people might carefully evaluate procedural fairness based on the facts of the case. Alternately, people could be guided by their prior preferences, endorsing the procedures that produce favored policy outcomes as fair and rating those that generate disliked outcomes as unfair. Using an experimental design, we consider the conditions under which people use accuracy goals versus directional goals in evaluating political processes. We find that when procedures are clearly fair or unfair, people make unbiased assessments of procedural justice. When the fairness of a process is ambiguous, people are more likely to use their prior attitudes as a guide.
Who’s the Party of the People? Economic Populism and the U.S. Public’s Beliefs About Political Parties
Stephen P. Nicholson and Gary M. Segura
Some observers of American politics have argued that Republicans have redrawn the social class basis of the parties by displacing the Democrats as the party of the common person. While others have addressed the argument by implication, we address the phenomenon itself. That is, we examine whether the populist rhetoric used by conservatives has reshaped the American public’s perceptions about the social class basis of American political parties. To this end, we used NES data and created novel survey questions for examining the class-based images of the parties. We examine whether the public holds populist images of the Republican Party and whether the working class and evangelical Christians are especially likely to hold this belief. Contrary to this argument, most Americans view the Democrats as the party of the people. Furthermore, working class and evangelical Christians are no less likely to hold this belief.

from Electoral Studies
Leaders, Voters and Activists in the Elections in Great Britain 2005 and 2010
Norman Schoeld, Maria Gallegoa and JeeSeon Jeon
Discussion of the relationship between parties and the electorate is often based on the notion of partisan constituencies, that parties adopt policy positions that correspond to the average position of the party supporters. In contrast, the Downsian.spatial model. assumes that parties are purely opportunistic and maneuver to gain as many votes as possible. A third, more empirical model, based on the early work of Stokes, assumes that voter choice is based on the evaluation of each of the party leader.s competence or ability to deliver policy success. Such an evaluation can be provided by individual voter overall assessment in terms of the leaders. character traits. This paper attempts to relate these three classes of models by examining the elections in Great Britain in 2005 and 2010. Using the British Election Study, we construct spatial models of these elections in Great Britain as well as in the three regions of England, Scotland and Wales. The models incorporate the electoral perceptions of character traits. We compare the equilibrium vote maximizing positions with the partisan positions, estimated by taking the mean of each of the parties voters.preferred positions. We de.ne an equilibrium to be a stable attractor if the vote share at the equilibrium exceeds the share at the partisan position by a signi.cant proportion (determined by the implicit error of the stochastic model). We infer that none of the equilibria are stable attractors, and suggest that the partisan positions are also preferred by the party activists, the key supporters of each party.
Strategic campaigning, closeness, and voter mobilization in U.S. Presidential elections
Damon M. Canna and Jeffrey Bryan Coleb
The scholarly literature on voter mobilization is ambivalent regarding the effects of closeness on turnout. Economic analyses of turnout (i.e. the classic calculus of voting) contend that as elections become closer, voters perceive their participation as more valuable because there is a greater chance that they will cast the deciding vote. Other work argues that voters do not take closeness into account because the probability that their vote uniquely changes the outcome of an election is quite small even in close elections. Still, this second perspective maintains that closeness may increase turnout because elites distribute campaign resources to places where election results could be affected by mobilizing additional supporters. While the latter perspective is theoretically well-developed, empirical support for the notion that elite activity (rather than citizen perceptions) connects closeness and turnout is limited. Using improved measures of closeness and campaign activities, we test for citizen perception and elite mobilization effects on turnout in the context of U.S. Presidential elections. Results show that while closeness has no direct effect on turnout, elites indeed target campaign activities on close states and the asymmetric distribution of resources across states results in higher turnout in battleground states.
Raising the tone? The impact of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ campaigning on voting in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election
Charles Pattiea, David Denverb, Robert Johns and James Mitchell
Most survey-based research on campaign effects in British elections has focussed on exposure to the campaign. Far less attention has been given to how the campaign is perceived, although American research on the effects of negative campaigning suggests that this is a potentially important area. The article investigates the extent to which vote choices in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election were affected by perceptions of the parties’ campaigns as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. Partisanship and increased exposure to a party’s campaign increased individuals’ chances of rating a campaign positively. Other things being equal, however, campaigns which come to be seen in a negative light backfire on the party responsible, reducing the propensity of people to vote for it.
Social pressure, surveillance and community size: Evidence from field experiments on voter turnout
Costas Panagopoulos
Citizens participate in elections, at least partly, because they perceive voting as a social norm. Norms induce compliance because individuals prefer to avoid enforcement mechanisms–including social sanctions–that can be activated by uncooperative behavior. Public visibility, or surveillance, increases the likelihood of norm-compliant behavior and applies social pressure that impels individuals to act. Some scholars have linked social pressure to community size, advancing the notion that pressure to conform to social norms is heightened in smaller, less populous communities in which citizens interact frequently and where monitoring behavior is less onerous. Others argue that even highly-populated communities can exhibit “small world” properties that cause residents to be sensitive to social pressure. In this paper, I analyze data from a recent field experiment designed to test the impact of social pressure on voting taking interactions with community size into account. The findings I report suggest community size does not moderate the impact of social pressure.
from Perspectives on Politics
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican
Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin
In the aftermath of a potentially demoralizing 2008 electoral defeat, when the Republican Party seemed widely discredited, the emergence of the Tea Party provided conservative activists with a new identity funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a network of conservative media sources. Untethered from recent GOP baggage and policy specifics, the Tea Party energized disgruntled white middle-class conservatives and garnered widespread attention, despite stagnant or declining favorability ratings among the general public. As participant observation and interviews with Massachusetts activists reveal, Tea Partiers are not monolithically hostile toward government; they distinguish between programs perceived as going to hard-working contributors to US society like themselves and “handouts” perceived as going to unworthy or freeloading people. During 2010, Tea Party activism reshaped many GOP primaries and enhanced voter turnout, but achieved a mixed record in the November general election. Activism may well continue to influence dynamics in Congress and GOP presidential primaries. Even if the Tea Party eventually subsides, it has undercut Obama’s presidency, revitalized conservatism, and pulled the national Republican Party toward the far right.
Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities. By Brian Mayer
Laura A. Henry
When do labor-environmental coalitions emerge and endure? In a period when headlines are dominated by economic recession, unemployment, and oil spills, the focus of Brian Mayer’s book takes on practical urgency. The question is theoretically intriguing as well. Labor unions are often characterized as archetypical interest-based organizations, representing industrial workers’ concerns for their own material well-being. Environmental mobilization, in contrast, is seen as a quality-of-life movement most commonly associated with members of the postindustrial middle class who possess leisure time and resources sufficient to enable their activism. When the question of how to regulate industries that employ toxic chemicals arises, these two groups can become locked in an acrimonious jobs versus the environment debate, making them more likely antagonists than allies. This sense of latent opposition is captured by one worker’s assertion that greens want to “save the whales and kill the workers” (p. 2). How can these divisions be overcome? In his clearly written and compelling book, Blue-Green Coalitions, Mayer argues that concern over the effects of hazardous materials on human health offers one avenue for generating powerful and enduring coalitions.
Response to Laura Henry’s review of Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities
Bryan Mayer
Both the labor and environmental movements have recently experienced significant crises of faith in their ability to mobilize enough popular support to carry on with their respective missions. At a 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a report entitled “The Death of Environmentalism” proclaimed that environmentalism as a special interest group had accomplished its goal of raising awareness but had ultimately failed to galvanize a sustainable social movement. Mirroring that debate within the environmental movement, in 2004 the Service Employees International Union called for major reforms within the AFL-CIO; demanding that the labor federation focus on organizing new workers rather than defending its existing members. This divide within the AFL-CIO ultimately led to the formation of the Change to Win coalition, with several other major unions joining the SEIU in a new reformist coalition federation.
from Public Opinion Quarterly
Rethinking the Role of Political Information
Matthew S. Levendusky
Political information is a central variable for the study of mass behavior; numerous theories argue that voters with more information behave fundamentally differently from those with less. Nearly all of the empirical support for these theories, however, comes from cross-sectional data. As a result, these findings are typically biased, and systematically overstate the effect of information on behavior. I demonstrate how to minimize these biases and more accurately estimate the effects of information using several different analytical techniques. These adjustments cause the estimated effect of information to shrink dramatically, often falling to one-half to one-quarter of its former size. I conclude by discussing the implications of my results for the study of political information and political behavior more generally.
Social Identity Processes and the Dynamics of Public Support for War

Scott L. Althaus and Kevin Coe
Contemporary theories of opinion dynamics–exemplified by Zaller’s “receive-accept-sample” model–tend to assume that attitude change should occur only following exposure to new, attitude-relevant information. Within this prevailing view, the expected direction and magnitude of opinion change is largely a function of the tone and content of the new information to which one is exposed. In contrast, social identification theories show how opinion change can occur when a person’s environmental context activates social knowledge stored in long-term memory. These theories propose that attitude change can result merely from increasing the perceived salience of a social conflict. They further propose that the direction and magnitude of opinion change should be unrelated to the tone or content of the information that draws attention to the conflict. This study examines how the ebb and flow of war news on the front page of the New York Times is related to changes in levels of domestic public support for major American military conflicts from 1950 to the present. We find no consistent or compelling evidence that levels of aggregate war support change in ways predicted by information updating models. To the contrary, a social identification process appears to be underlying the aggregate dynamics of war support.
Measuring Americans’ Issue Priorities: A New Version of the Most Important Problem Question Reveals More Concern About Global Warming and the Environment
David Scott Yeager, Samuel B. Larson, Jon A. Krosnick and Trevor Tompson
For decades, numerous surveys have asked Americans the “Most Important Problem” (MIP) question: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” Global warming and the environment have rarely been cited by more than a small number of respondents in these surveys in recent years, which might seem to suggest that these have not been the most important issues to Americans. This paper explores the possibility that an additional method of assessing the public’s priorities might support a different conclusion. Three experiments embedded in national surveys (two done via the Internet, the other done by telephone) show that when asked the traditional MIP question, respondents rarely mentioned global warming or the environment, but when other respondents were asked to identify the most serious problem that will face the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it, global warming and the environment were the most frequently mentioned problems. Furthermore, a large majority of Americans indicated that they wanted the federal government to devote substantial effort to combating problems that the world will face in the future if nothing is done to stop them. Thus, future surveys might include both versions of the MIP question to more fully document Americans’ priorities.
Electoral Competition and the Voter
Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan
This article examines how electoral competition, in the form of district-level campaign expenditures, affects voters’ opinions about elections. We direct our attention at how voters perceive competition, and at how electoral competition affects how people perceive elections. Although people generally overestimate the competitiveness of U.S. House races, we demonstrate that perceptions of competition are connected to actual levels of campaign activity. We also find that electoral competition may have contradictory democratic effects. District-level spending is associated with greater attention to news about the local campaign, but also with greater dissatisfaction with election choices.
from Political Science Quarterly
The Republican Resurgence in 2010
Gary C. Jacobsen
Analyzes the 2010 midterm election as a referendum on the Obama administration, driven fundamentally by the economy, but intensified by the deep animosity of the President’s opponents, the Republicans’ success in nationalizing the election, and the political failure of Obama’s legislative successes.
Managing Fear: The Politics of Homeland Security
BENJAMIN H. FRIEDMAN
Argues that the United States has spent excessively on homeland security since September 11. He outlines psychological and political explanations for this overreaction and concludes that these factors make some overreaction to terrorism unavoidable but offers four strategies to mitigate it.
from Politics & Society
What Do We Really Know About Racial Inequality? Labor Markets, Politics, and the Historical Basis of Black Economic Fortunes
William Sites & Virginia Parks
Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black–white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors–social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns–and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets.
The Emancipatory Effect of Deliberation: Empirical Lessons from Mini-Publics

Simon Niemeyer
This article investigates the prospects of deliberative democracy through the analysis of small-scale deliberative events, or mini-publics, using empirical methods to understand the process of preference transformation. Evidence from two case studies suggests that deliberation corrects preexisting distortions of public will caused by either active manipulation or passive overemphasis on symbolically potent issues. Deliberation corrected these distortions by reconnecting participants’ expressed preferences to their underlying “will” as well as shaping a shared understanding of the issue.The article concludes by using these insights to suggest ways that mini-public deliberation might be articulated to the broader public sphere so that the benefits might be scaled up. That mini-public deliberation does not so much change individual subjectivity as reconnect it to the expression of will suggests that scaling up the transformative effects should be possible so long as this involves communicating in the form of reasons rather than preferred outcome alone.

from Electoral Studies
Estimating the Potential Impact of Nonvoters on Outcomes of Parliamentary Elections in Proportional Systems with an Application to German National Elections from 1949 to 2009
Ulrich Kohler
February 2011
ABSTRACT
“If turnout was 100%, would it affect the election result?” is a frequently asked research question. So far, the question has been primarily answered regarding the changes in the distribution of votes. This article extends the analysis to changes in the distribution of seats and government formation. It therefore proposes a method that fact ors in apportionment methods, barring clauses, sizes of parliaments, leverage of nonvoters, closeness of election results, and individual characteristics of nonvoters. The method is then applied to German national elections from 1949 to 2009. The application shows that Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) would have gained from the counterfactual participation of nonvoters, although usually not enough to result in a government change. However, the elections of 1994 and 2005 show evidence that such a change could have happened.
from Political Behavior
The Poverty of Participation: Self Interest, Student Loans and Student Activism
Joshua Ozymy
February 2011
ABSTRACT
Political scientists maintain that self-interest should motivate political participation; however, empirical verification of the self-interest motive for participating is rare. Self-interested activism among the less-affluent is shown to be even more uncommon. Results of the present study suggest that when lower-income college students have resources and increased self-interest motives to act, not only do they choose to participate, they do so at higher levels than their more affluent peers. Utilizing policy-motivated activism (defined as voting, contributing, and contacting officials) with respect to student loans, the analysis suggests that the probability of contacting increases among student borrowers as their income decreases. Results suggest that lower-income borrowers are more likely to participate out of concern for the program than their higher-income counterparts, and self-interest explains the behavior.
Did Disfranchisement Laws Help Elect President Bush? New Evidence on the Turnout Rates and Candidate Preferences of Florida’s Ex-Felons
Traci Burch
February 2011
ABSTRACT
This paper re-examines the impact of Florida’s disfranchisement law on the 2000 Presidential election. The analysis simulates outcomes in Florida under scenarios consistent with the turnout rates of Georgia and North Carolina ex-felons in 2000 and Florida ex-felons in 2008. Survey evidence on candidate preferences as well as data on ex-felon party registration in Florida and North Carolina are used to produce estimates of support for Bush and Gore among ex-felons. Based on the simulations, the ex-felon population in Florida would have favored Bush in 2000. Assuming that ex-felons supported Gore at rates similar to GSS respondents with at most a high school diploma, Bush would have defeated Gore by 4,925 and 7,048 votes, assuming turnout of 10 and 15%, respectively.
Updating Political Evaluations: Policy Attitudes, Partisanship, and Presidential Assessments
Benjamin Highton
The pervasive influence of partisanship on political evaluations is well known and understood. Whether citizens rely on their policy attitudes has received less attention, especially in the context of how people update and revise their evaluations. This paper focuses on presidential assessments and uses panel data covering three presidencies to model the determinants of opinion change. The results indicate that policy preferences (like partisanship) exert a regular and substantial influence on how citizens update their presidential evaluations.
from Political PsychologyExploring the Valence-Framing Effect: Negative Framing Enhances Attitude Strength
George Y. Bizer, Jeff T. Larsen and Richard E. Petty
February 2011
ABSTRACT
In his now-classic research on inoculation theory, McGuire (1964) demonstrated that exposing people to an initial weak counterattitudinal message could lead to enhanced resistance to a subsequent stronger counterattitudinal message. More recently, research on the valence-framing effect (Bizer & Petty, 2005) demonstrated an alternative way to make attitudes more resistant. Simply framing a person’s attitude negatively (i.e., in terms of a rejected position such as anti-Democrat) led to more resistance to an attack on that attitude than did framing the same attitude positively (i.e., in terms of a preferred position such as pro-Republican). Using an election context, the current research tested whether valence framing influences attitude resistance specifically or attitude strength more generally, providing insight into the effect’s mechanism and generalizability. In two experiments, attitude valence was manipulated by framing a position either negatively or positively. Experiment 1 showed that negatively framed attitudes were held with more certainty than were positively framed attitudes. In Experiment 2, conducted among a representative sample of residents of two U.S. states during political campaigns, negatively framed attitudes demonstrated higher levels of attitude certainty and attitude-consistent behavioral intentions than did attitudes that were framed positively. Furthermore, the effect of valence framing on behavioral intentions was mediated by attitude certainty. Valence framing thus appears to be a relatively low-effort way to impact multiple features associated with strong attitudes.
The End of the Solidly Democratic South: The Impressionable-Years Hypothesis
Danny Osborne, David O. Sears and Nicholas A. Valentino
February 2011
ABSTRACT
The partisan realignment of the White South, which transformed this region from being solidly Democratic to being the base of the Republican Party, has been the focus of much scholarship. Exactly how it occurred is unclear. Widespread individual-level attitude changes would be contrary to the well-known within-person stability of party identification. However, according to the impressionable-years hypothesis, events that occur during adolescence and early adulthood may have a lasting impact on later political attitudes. This would suggest that cohort replacement may be driving partisan realignment. We test this possibility using data from the American National Election Studies from 1960 to 2008. Consistent with the impressionable-years hypothesis, Southern Whites from the pre-Civil Rights cohort (born before 1936) maintained their Democratic Party identification longer than their younger counterparts. However, all cohorts in the South have changed their partisan attitudes at comparable rates over time, contrary to the impressionable-years hypothesis. These data suggest that the partisan realignment of the South was driven by both cohort replacement and within-cohort attitude change. More targeted case studies of older cohorts living through the civil rights era, and of younger cohorts in the post-Reagan era, yield results generally consistent with the impressionable-years hypothesis. More generally, our findings suggest that very large scale events are required to disrupt the normal continuity of party identification across the life span.
Religious Appeals and Implicit Attitudes
Bethany L. Albertson
February 2011
ABSTRACT
This article explores the effects of religious appeals by politicians on attitudes and behavior. Although politicians frequently make religious appeals, the effectiveness of these appeals and the mechanisms of persuasion are unknown. This article explores the possibility that religious language can affect political attitudes through implicit processes. Because religious attachments are formed early in the lives of many Americans, religious language may influence citizens without their awareness. Implicit and explicit attitudes are related but distinct constructs, and implicit attitudes may have behavioral implications in the political realm. I test these hypotheses experimentally, relying on a widely used implicit measure, the Implicit Association Test. I find that a Christian religious appeal affects implicit attitudes and political behavior among people who currently or previously identify as Christian. Furthermore, an explicit preference for less religion in politics does not moderate implicit effects.
How Exposure to the Confederate Flag Affects Willingness to Vote for Barack Obama
Joyce Ehrlinger, E. Ashby Plant, Richard P. Eibach, Corey J. Columb, Joanna L. Goplen, Jonathan W. Kunstman and David A. Butz
February 2011
ABSTRACT
Leading up to the 2008 U.S. election, pundits wondered whether Whites, particularly in Southern states, were ready to vote for a Black president. The present paper explores how a common Southern symbol–the Confederate flag–impacted willingness to vote for Barack Obama. We predicted that exposure to the Confederate flag would activate negativity toward Blacks and result in lowered willingness to vote for Obama. As predicted, participants primed with the Confederate flag reported less willingness to vote for Obama than those primed with a neutral symbol. The flag did not affect willingness to vote for White candidates. In a second study, participants primed with the Confederate flag evaluated a hypothetical Black target more negatively than controls. These results suggest that exposure to the Confederate flag results in more negative judgments of Black targets. As such, the prevalence of this flag in the South may have contributed to a reticence for some to vote for Obama because of his race.

From American Journal of Political ScienceThe Party Faithful: Partisan Images, Candidate Religion, and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification
David E. Campbell, John C. Green, Geoffrey . Layman
We argue that the factors shaping the impact of partisanship on vote choice–“partisan voting”–depend on the nature of party identification. Because party identification is partly based on images of the social group characteristics of the parties, the social profiles of political candidates should affect levels of partisan voting. A candidate’s religious affiliation enables a test of this hypothesis. Using survey experiments which vary a hypothetical candidate’s religious affiliation, we find strong evidence that candidates’ religions can affect partisan voting. Identifying a candidate as an evangelical (a group viewed as Republican) increases Republican support for, and Democratic opposition to, the candidate, while identifying the candidate as a Catholic (a group lacking a clear partisan profile) has no bearing on partisan voting. Importantly, the conditional effect of candidate religion on partisan voting requires the group to have a salient partisan image and holds with controls for respondents’ own religious affiliations and ideologies.
Gendered Perceptions and Political Candidacies: A Central Barrier to Women’s Equality in Electoral Politics
Richard L. Fox, Jennifer L. Lawless
Based on the second wave of the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study, we provide the first thorough analysis of how gender affects women and men’s efficacy to run for office. Our findings reveal that, despite comparable credentials, backgrounds, and experiences, accomplished women are substantially less likely than similarly situated men to perceive themselves as qualified to seek office. Importantly, women and men rely on the same factors when evaluating themselves as candidates, but women are less likely than men to believe they meet these criteria. Not only are women more likely than men to doubt that they have skills and traits necessary for electoral politics, but they are also more likely to doubt their abilities to engage in campaign mechanics. These findings are critical because the perceptual differences we uncover account for much of the gender gap in potential candidates’ self-efficacy and ultimately hinder women’s prospects for political equality.
How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court
Christopher J. Casillas, Peter K. Enns, Patrick C. Wohlfarth
Although scholars increasingly acknowledge a contemporaneous relationship between public opinion and Supreme Court decisions, debate continues as to why this relationship exists. Does public opinion directly influence decisions or do justices simply respond to the same social forces that simultaneously shape the public mood? To answer this question, we first develop a strategy to control for the justices’ attitudinal change that stems from the social forces that influence public opinion. We then propose a theoretical argument that predicts strategic justices should be mindful of public opinion even in cases when the public is unlikely to be aware of the Court’s activities. The results suggest that the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions is real, substantively important, and most pronounced in nonsalient cases.
From British Journal of Political Science
Research Article
Downs, Stokes and the Dynamics of Electoral Choice
David Sanders, Harold D. Clarke, Marianne C. Stewart and Paul Whiteley
January 2011
ABSTRACT
six-wave 2005-09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice. However, spatial effects still have sizeable indirect effects on the vote via their influence on valence judgements. The results of exogeneity tests bolster claims about the flow of influence from spatial calculations to valence judgments to electoral choice.
‘The Arithmetic of Compassion’: Rethinking the Politics of Photography
James Johnson
January 2011
ABSTRACT
Compassion, theorists from Arendt to Nussbaum suggest, carries an ineluctable pressure to identify with individual suffering. The very idea of a politics of compassion verges on incoherence. Politics typically demands attention to the aggregate and it is just there that compassion falters. This is a problem for critics addressing the politics of photography, who typically presume that the point of photographs must be to elicit compassion among viewers. But a proper understanding of compassion makes this presumption highly problematic. The role of compassion in exemplary writings on the politics of photography reflects a fixation with ’emblematic’ individual subjects in ‘classic’ American documentary practice, which prevents critics from properly grasping the best of contemporary documentary. The conclusion is that promoting solidarity provides a more plausible, if elusive, aim for the politics of photography.
National Debates, Local Responses: The Origins of Local Concern about Immigration in Britain and the United States
Daniel J. Hopkins
January 2011
ABSTRACT
Theories of inter-group threat hold that local concentrations of immigrants produce resource competition and anti-immigrant attitudes. Variants of these theories are commonly applied to Britain and the United States. Yet the empirical tests have been inconsistent. This paper analyses geo-coded surveys from both countries to identify when residents’ attitudes are influenced by living near immigrant communities. Pew surveys from the United States and the 2005 British Election Study illustrate how local contextual effects hinge on national politics. Contextual effects appear primarily when immigration is a nationally salient issue, which explains why past research has not always found a threat. Seemingly local disputes have national catalysts. The paper also demonstrates how panel data can reduce selection biases that plague research on local contextual effects
From Electoral Studies
Uncovering the Micro-foundations of Turnout and Electoral Systems
Tse-hsin Chen
January 2011
ABSTRACT
This paper tackles the micro-foundations of voting and addresses why proportional representation systems (PR) are associated with higher turnout than majoritarian systems (SMD). I argue that individual evaluations of the differential benefit in the calculus of voting are affected by spatial party competition framed by electoral institutions. Unlike PR, SMD constrains the number of parties and creates large centripetal forces for party competition, which reduces the perceived benefits of voting. A citizen’s voting propensity is related to the distance between her preferred policy position and those of her most- and least-favored parties. I use multilevel modeling to analyze individual voting decisions structured by aggregate variables across 64 elections. The empirical findings confirm the argument and the mechanism holds both in established and non-established democracies.
From The Journal of Politics
When Candidates Value Good Character: A Spatial Model with Applications to Congressional Elections
James Adams, Samuel Merrill III, Elizabeth N. Simas and Walter J. Stone
January 2011
ABSTRACT
We add to the literature that examines the relationship between candidate valence and policy strategies by arguing that candidates intrinsically value both the policies and the personal character of the winning candidate. In making this argument, we distinguish between two dimensions of candidate valence: strategic valence refers to factors such as name recognition, fundraising ability, and campaigning skills, while character valence is composed of qualities that voters and candidates intrinsically value in office holders, including integrity, competence, and diligence. Our model considers challengers who value both the policies and the character-based valence of the incumbent and assumes that the incumbent’s policy position is fixed by prior commitments. Under these conditions, we show that challengers who are superior to the incumbent in their character-based valence have incentives to moderate their policy positions. We report empirical tests of this good-government result of our model, using data on the 2006 congressional elections.
The Role of Candidate Traits in Campaigns
Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney
January 2011
ABSTRACT
We examine how candidates shape citizens’ impressions of their personal traits during U.S. Senate campaigns. We look at the personality traits emphasized by candidates in their controlled communications and in news coverage of their campaigns. We couple information about campaign messages with a unique survey dataset allowing us to examine voters’ understanding and evaluations of the candidates’ personalities. We find that messages from the news media influence people’s willingness to rate the candidates on trait dimensions. In addition, negative trait messages emanating from challengers and the press shape citizens’ impressions of incumbents. In contrast, voters’ evaluations of challengers are unmoved by campaign messages, irrespective of the source or tone of the communications. Finally, we find citizens rely heavily on traits when evaluating competing candidates in U.S. Senate campaigns, even controlling for voters’ party, ideological, and issue preferences.
Do Women and Men Know Different Things? Measuring Gender Differences in Political Knowledge
Kathleen Dolan
January 2010
ABSTRACT
That women exhibit lower levels of political knowledge than men is a common and consistent finding in political science research. Recently, scholars have begun examining whether the content and structure of political knowledge measures contribute to women’s perceived knowledge deficit. In an attempt to enter the debate on the explanations for gender differences in knowledge, I create and test a number of measures of gender-relevant political knowledge to determine whether broadening our definitions of what constitutes “knowledge” may help us more clearly understand the apparent gender gap in political knowledge in the United States. The results indicate that expected gender differences disappear when respondents are asked about the levels of women’s representation in the national government.
The Persuasive Effects of Direct Mail: A Regression Discontinuity Based Approach
Alan S. Gerber, Daniel P. Kessler and Marc Meredith
January 2011
ABSTRACT
During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out six pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent’s conduct in office. We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and voter turnout. We find these mailings had a politically significant effect on the challenger’s vote share, which is statistically significant in most, but not all, of our specifications. Our point estimates suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in the amount of mail sent to a precinct increased the challenger’s vote share by 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points. Furthermore, our results suggest that these mailings had little mobilizing effect, suggesting that the mechanism for this increase was persuasion.
Election Night’s Alright for Fighting: The Role of Emotions in Political Participation
Nicholas A. Valentino, Ted Brader, Eric W. Groenendyk, Krysha Gregorowicz and
Vincent L. Hutchings
January 2011
ABSTRACT
A large literature has established a persistent association between the skills and resources citizens possess and their likelihood of participating in politics. However, the short-term motivational forces that cause citizens to employ those skills and expend resources in one election but not the next have only recently received attention. Findings in political psychology suggest specific emotions may play an important role in mobilization, but the question of “which emotions play what role?” remains an important area of debate. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory and the Affective Intelligence model, we predict that anger, more than anxiety or enthusiasm, will mobilize. We find evidence for the distinctive influence of anger in a randomized experiment, a national survey of the 2008 electorate, and in pooled American National Election Studies from 1980 to 2004.
The Long-Term Dynamics of Partisanship and Issue Orientations
Benjamin Highton and Cindy D. Kam
January 2011
ABSTRACT
Partisanship and issue orientations are among the foundational concepts for behavioral researchers. We seek to understand their causal relationship. One view suggests that party identification, as a central and long-standing affective orientation, influences citizens’ issue positions. Another view claims that issue orientations influence party identification. We take both theories into account in this article and argue that the direction of causality may depend upon the political context. Using the Political Socialization Panel Study, we analyze the long-term dynamic relationship between partisanship and issue orientations. The results from our cross-lagged structural equation models are inconsistent with a single, time-invariant, unidirectional causal story. The causal relationship between partisanship and issue orientations appears to depend upon the larger political context. In the early period from 1973 to 1982, partisanship causes issue orientations. In the later period, from 1982 to 1997, the causal arrow is reversed, and issue orientations significantly shape partisanship.
A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes
Peter K. Hatemi, Nathan A. Gillespie, Lindon J. Eaves, Brion S. Maher, Bradley T. Webb, Andrew C. Heath, Sarah E. Medland, David C. Smyth, Harry N. Beeby, Scott D. Gordon, Grant W. Montgomery, Ghu Zhu, Enda M. Byrne and Nicholas G. Martin
January 2011
ABSTRACT
The assumption that the transmission of social behaviors and political preferences is purely cultural has been challenged repeatedly over the last 40 years by the combined evidence of large studies of adult twins and their relatives, adoption studies, and twins reared apart. Variance components and path modeling analyses using data from extended families quantified the overall genetic influence on political attitudes, but few studies have attempted to localize the parts of the genome which accounted for the heritability estimates found for political preferences. Here, we present the first genome-wide analysis of Conservative-Liberal attitudes from a sample of 13,000 respondents whose DNA was collected in conjunction with a 50-item sociopolitical attitude questionnaire. Several significant linkage peaks were identified and potential candidate genes discussed.
From PS: Political Science & Politics
Postmortems of the 2010 Midterm Election Forecasts: The Predicted Midterm Landslide
James E. Campbell
January 2011
ABSTRACT
The “Seats in Trouble” forecasting model predicted in mid-August that Republicans would gain a landslide number of seats in the 2010 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, and that this number would be sufficiently large to restore their majority control of the House, which was lost in the 2006 midterms. Republicans were predicted to gain approximately 51 or 52 seats, about the magnitude of their 1994 midterm victory and the largest seat change since the Truman-Dewey election of 1948. As predicted, on Election Day, Republicans won a landslide number of seats, enough to give them a substantial House majority.
Postmortems of the 2010 Midterm Election Forecasts: Forecasting House Seats from Generic Congressional Polls: A Post-Mortem
Joseph Bafumi, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien
January 2011
ABSTRACT
Based on information available in July, we predicted that the Republicans would receive 52.9% of the total House vote and end up holding 229 seats, gaining control from the Democrats in the process (Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien 2010b). Our national vote forecast proved to be nearly correct, undershooting the actual Republican share (53.8%) by slightly less than one percentage point. Our seat forecast was a little less accurate. Although we did foresee the House changing hands, we did not predict such a large Republican windfall in seats–we forecast a “mere” swing of 50 seats, which was short of the actual outcome by about 13 seats. The Republican seat total of 242, however, was well within the 95% confidence interval (199 to 259).
Postmortems of the 2010 Midterm Election Forecasts: Congressional Forecasts: Theory Versus Tracking in 2010
Michael S. Lewis-Becka1 and Charles Tien
January 2011
ABSTRACT
In our recent article forecasting the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, we argue for a model based on theory rather than tracking (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2010). A sound theoretical explanation of vote choice in House races should, ceteris paribus, predict better than a simple dependence on variables that proxy the vote, such as the generic ballot question. We posited a simple but classical explanation of the 2010 House vote–the referendum model–in which voters punish or reward the party in power according to its performance in office and the time available for that performance. In words, the model reads: House Seat Change = f(Economy, Popularity, Midterm). A measurement of these variables, at lags appropriate for forecasting, yields the estimates (OLS) of model 1, shown in column 1 of table 1. Model 1 gives a forecast of −22 seats for the Democrats in 2010, when, in fact, they scored about −60 seats. The model 1 forecast appears “wrong” in two senses. First, substantively, it fails to predict the Republican takeover of the House. Second, scientifically, it is off by over two standard errors of estimate (i.e., 38/17 > 2.0). Why did the model get it wrong this time, when the forecast was off by only one seat in the last midterm in 2006? To answer this question, the specifications of the model need consideration. Such consideration signals the scientific value of the forecasting exercise in providing a systematic trial-and-error method for model improvement.
Postmortems of the 2010 Midterm Election Forecasts: Assessing The 2010 State Legislative Election Forecasting Models
Carl Klarner
January 2011
ABSTRACT
This brief note reports the accuracy of my two forecasts for the 2010 state legislative elections, one made on July 22 and reported in the October 2010 issue of this journal (the “PS model”; Klarner 2010a), and the other made on September 18 and reported in the October issue of Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics (i.e., the “Forum model”; Klarner 2010b). Both models used presidential approval, the state of the economy, and midterm loss as national-level predictor variables, while the later forecast also used Gallup’s generic ballot question asking respondents which party they would vote for in the upcoming U.S. House election. The PS model predicted the Republicans would pick up 11 chambers, while the Forum model forecast a 15-chamber pickup. In actuality, the Republicans picked up 21 chambers, in contrast to the average 3.2-net chamber shift in party control toward one party or the other from 1962 to 2008. While both forecasts understated the extent of the Republican wave, the July forecast especially did. Overall, the Forum forecast did a good job of predicting the Republican wave, calling about three-fourths of its magnitude.
Partisan Vision Biases Determination of Voter Intent
Peter A. Ubel and Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher
January 2011
ABSTRACT
In close, disputed elections, outcomes can depend on determinations of voter intent for ballots that have been filled out improperly. We surveyed 899 adult Minnesotans during a time when the state’s U.S. Senate election was still disputed and presented them with ambiguous ballots similar to ballots under dispute in the same election. We randomized participants to three experimental groups, across which we varied the names on the ballot. We found that participants’ judgments of voter intent were strongly biased by their voting preferences (p < .002 in all four ballots). From Political Behavior
Mobilizing Collective Identity: Frames & Rational Individuals
Christy Aroopala
January 2011
ABSTRACT
Mobilization of collective identities is a common tool in election campaigns and policy debates. Frames that target group identity can mobilize groups; however it is unclear when these group frames are likely to be successful. This project explores whether moderators, or factors that limit framing effects, can help predict whether individuals will respond to group mobilization attempts. Drawing on the rational choice approach, I assess whether the presence of thresholds (i.e. rules that determines how far the group is from attaining its goal) works as a moderator of framing effects. Using a voting game laboratory experiment, I analyze the impact of group frames when distance from a fixed threshold varies and when we account for differences in group identity strength. The findings indicate that the interaction of group identity strength, group frames, and moderators of frames has an important impact on participation, suggesting that environmental factors play a significant role in group mobilization.

From The American Political Science Review
Dynamic Public Opinion: Communication Effects over Time
DENNIS CHONG and JAMES N. DRUCKMAN
December 2010
ABSTRACT
We develop an approach to studying public opinion that accounts for how people process competing messages received over the course of a political campaign or policy debate. Instead of focusing on the fixed impact of a message, we emphasize that a message can have variable effects depending on when it is received within a competitive context and how it is evaluated. We test hypotheses about the effect of information processing using data from two experiments that measure changes in public opinion in response to alternative sequences of information. As in past research, we find that competing messages received at the same time neutralize one another. However, when competing messages are separated by days or weeks, most individuals give disproportionate weight to the most recent communication because previous effects decay over time. There are exceptions, though, as people who engage in deliberate processing of information display attitude stability and give disproportionate weight to previous messages. These results show that people typically form significantly different opinions when they receive competing messages over time than when they receive the same messages simultaneously. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the power of communications in contemporary politics.
Party Affiliation, Partisanship, and Political Beliefs: A Field Experiment
ALAN S. GERBER, GREGORY A. HUBER and EBONYA WASHINGTON
December 2010
Abstract
Partisanship is strongly correlated with attitudes and behavior, but it is unclear from this pattern whether partisan identity has a causal effect on political behavior and attitudes. We report the results of a field experiment that investigates the causal effect of party identification. Prior to the February 2008 Connecticut presidential primary, researchers sent a mailing to a random sample of unaffiliated registered voters who, in a pretreatment survey, leaned toward a political party. The mailing informed the subjects that only voters registered with a party were able to participate in the upcoming presidential primary. Subjects were surveyed again in June 2008. Comparing posttreatment survey responses to subjects’ baseline survey responses, we find that those reminded of the need to register with a party were more likely to identify with a party and showed stronger partisanship. Further, we find that the treatment group also demonstrated greater concordance than the control group between their pretreatment latent partisanship and their posttreatment reported voting behavior and intentions and evaluations of partisan figures. Thus, our treatment, which appears to have caused a strengthening of partisan identity, also appears to have caused a shift in subjects’ candidate preferences and evaluations of salient political figures. This finding is consistent with the claim that partisanship is an active force changing how citizens behave in and perceive the political world.
Competition between Specialized Candidates
STEFAN KRASA and MATTIAS POLBORN
December 2010
Abstract
Opposing candidates for a political office often differ in their professional backgrounds and previous political experience, leading to both real and perceived differences in political capabilities. We analyze a formal model in which candidates with different productivities in two policy areas compete for voters by choosing how much money or effort they would allocate to each area if elected. The model has a unique equilibrium that differs substantially from the standard median voter model. Although candidates compete for the support of a moderate voter type, this cutoff voter differs from the expected median voter. Moreover, no voter type except the cutoff voter is indifferent between the candidates in equilibrium. The model also predicts that candidates respond to changes in the preferences of voters in a very rigid way. From a welfare perspective, candidates are “excessively moderate”: almost certainly, a majority of voters would prefer that the winning candidate focus more on his or her strength.
Political Consequences of the Carceral State
VESLA M. WEAVER and AMY E. LERMAN
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Contact with the criminal justice system is greater today than at any time in our history. In this article, we argue that interactions with criminal justice are an important source of political socialization, in which the lessons that are imprinted are antagonistic to democratic participation and inspire negative orientations toward government. To test this argument, we conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how criminal justice involvement shapes the citizenship and political voice of a growing swath of Americans. We find that custodial involvement carries with it a substantial civic penalty that is not explained by criminal propensity or socioeconomic differences alone. Given that the carceral state has become a routine site of interaction between government and citizens, institutions of criminal justice have emerged as an important force in defining citizen participation and understandings, with potentially dire consequences for democratic ideals.
From British Journal of Political Science
Informal Social Networks and Rational Voting
Samuel Abrams, Torben Iversen and David Soskice
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Classical rational choice explanations of voting participation are widely thought to have failed. This article argues that the currently dominant Group Mobilization and Ethical Agency approaches have serious shortcomings in explaining individually rational turnout. It develops an informal social network (ISN) model in which people rationally vote if their informal networks of family and friends attach enough importance to voting, because voting leads to social approval and vice versa. Using results from the social psychology literature, research on social groups in sociology and their own survey data, the authors argue that the ISN model can explain individually rational non-altruistic turnout. If group variables that affect whether voting is used as a marker of individual standing in groups are included, the likelihood of turnout rises dramatically.
From Electoral Studies
Measuring party positions and issue salience from media coverage: Discussing and cross-validating new indicators
Marc Helbling and Anke Tresch
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue salience from media coverage: the core sentence approach and political claims analysis. Our cross-validation shows that with regard to party positions, indicators derived from the media converge with traditionally used measurements from party manifestos, mass surveys and expert judgments, but that salience indicators measure different underlying constructs. We conclude with a discussion of specific research questions for which media data offer potential advantages over more established methods.
Do voters affect or elect policies? A new perspective, with evidence from the U.S. Senate
David Albouy
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Using quasi-experimental evidence from close elections, Lee et al. (2004) – henceforth LMB – argue competition for voters in U.S. House elections does not affect policy positions, as incumbent Senate candidates do not vote more extremely if elected than non-incumbents. Despite stronger electoral competition and greater legislative independence, similar results, shown here, hold for the Senate. Yet, the hypothesis that voters do not affect policies conflicts with how Senators moderate their positions prior to their next election. LMB-style estimates appear to be biased downwards as junior members of Congress prefer to vote more extremely than senior members, independently of their electoral strength. Corrected estimates are more favorable to the hypothesis that candidates moderate their policy choices in response to electoral competition.
The dynamic political economy of support for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election campaign
Thomas J. Scotto, Harold D. Clarke, Allan Kornberg, Jason Reifler, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, Paul Whiteley
December 2010
ABSTRACT
In recent years, students of voting behavior have become increasingly interested in valence politics models of electoral choice. These models share the core assumption that key issues in electoral politicds typically are ones upon which there is a widespread public consensus on the goals of public policy. The present paper uses latent curve modeling procedures and data from a six-wave national panel survey of the American electorate to investigate the dynamic effects of voters’ concerns with the worsening economy–a valence issue par excellence–in the skein of causal forces at work in the 2008 presidential election campaign. As the campaign developed, the economy became the dominant issue. Although the massively negative public reaction to increasingly perilous economic conditions was not the only factor at work in 2008, dynamic multivariate analyses show that mounting worries about the economy played an important role in fueling Barack Obama’s successful run for the presidency.
Policy attitudes, ideology and voting behavior in the 2008 Election
William G. Jacoby
December 2010
ABSTRACT
This article examines the impact of policy attitudes and ideology on voting behavior in the 2010 U.S. presidential election. The analysis uses data from the 2008 American National Election Study. The empirical results indicate that the 2008 election should not be regarded as a simple referendum on the George W. Bush presidency. At the same time, voting behavior was not particularly aligned along stark policy divisions; the direct effects of issue attitudes were confined largely to the most sophisticated stratum of the electorate. Finally, liberal-conservative orientations did affect citizens’ political attitudes and candidate choices in ways that are fairly unique, compared to other recent elections.
The dynamics of candidate evaluations and vote choice in 2008: looking to the past or future?
Roy Elis, D. Sunshine Hillygus, Norman Nie
December 2010
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we leverage a 10-wave election panel to examine the relative and dynamic effects of voter evaluations of Bush, Palin, Biden, McCain, and Obama in the 2008 presidential election. We show that the effects of these political figures on vote choice evolves through the campaign, with the predictive effects of President Bush declining after the nominees are known, and the effects of the candidates (and Palin), increasing towards Election Day. In evaluating the relative effects of these political figures on individual-level changes in vote choice during the fall campaign, we also find that evaluations of the candidates and Sarah Palin dwarf that of President Bush. Our results suggest a Bayesian model of voter decision making in which retrospective evaluations of the previous administration might provide a starting point for assessing the candidates, but prospective evaluations based on information learned during the campaign helps voters to update their candidate preference. Finally, we estimate the “Palin effect,” based on individual-level changes in favorability towards the vice-presidential nominee, and conclude that her campaign performance cost McCain just under 2% of the final vote share.
Transformation and polarization: The 2008 presidential election and the new American electorate
Alan I. Abramowitz
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Along with the unpopularity of President Bush and the dire condition of the U.S. economy, changes in the composition of the American electorate played a major role in Barack Obama’s decisive victory in the 2008 presidential election. The doubling of the nonwhite share of the electorate between 1992 and 2008 was critical to Obama’s election as African-American and other nonwhite voters provided him with a large enough margin to overcome a substantial deficit among white voters. In addition, voters under the age of 30 preferred Obama by a better than 2-1 margin, accounting for more than 80 percent of his popular vote margin. Despite the overall Democratic trend, the results revealed an increasingly polarized electorate. Over the past three decades the coalitions supporting the two major parties have become much more distinctive geographically, racially, and ideologically. The growth of the nonwhite electorate along with the increasing liberalism and Democratic identification of younger voters suggest that a successful Obama presidency could put the Democratic Party in a position to dominate American politics for many years. However, these trends appear to be provoking an intense reaction from some opponents of the President. The frustration and anger displayed at “tea party” demonstrations and town hall meetings may reflect not just discomfort with Barack Obama’s race but the perceived threat that Obama and his supporters represent to the social status and power of those on the opposing side.
The personal vote and voter turnout
Joseph W. Robbins
December 2010
ABSTRACT
The level of electoral turnout is arguably the most widely monitored form of electoral participation. Consequently, electoral systems have often been cited as having a significant effect on turnout levels even though scholars do not agree on the effects of these complex institutions. Since most previous studies have relied on categorical or dichotomous electoral system indicators, this study utilizes Carey and Shugart’s personal vote index to gain theoretical leverage on other electoral system components. In short, I find that where electoral competition is predicated on party, rather than candidates’, reputations, turnout levels rise. The results of a time-series cross-sectional analysis reveal that the personal vote index significantly influences turnout levels even when controlling for a host of other factors.
From Political Research Quarterly
Beyond Supply and Demand: A Feminist-institutionalist Theory of Candidate Selection
Mona Lena Krook
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Dynamics of candidate selection are central to political representation. The dominant model used to study the case of women focuses on the supply of and demand for female aspirants. This article develops a critique of this approach, by drawing on two sets of theoretical tools: institutionalism and feminism. It subsequently elaborates an alternative perspective on candidate selection based on configurations of three kinds of gendered institutions: systemic, practical, and normative. The utility of this approach is then explored through three paired comparisons of cases in which quota policies have been introduced, disrupting some but not necessarily all aspects of gendered institutional configurations.
Campaign Effects on the Accessibility of Party Identification
J. Tobin Grant, Stephen T. Mockabee and J. Quin Monson
December 2010
ABSTRACT
This study uses response latency, the time required for a survey respondent to formulate an answer upon hearing a question, to examine the accessibility of partisan self identifications over the course of a political campaign season. Although the aggregate distribution of partisanship remains fairly stable during the campaign, party identifications become more accessible to individuals with weaker party identifications as the election approaches. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the authors find that partisan orientations are more useful in forming political judgments when those orientations are more accessible to the voter. The effect of partisanship on vote choice is a third greater for voters with highly accessible party identifications than for those with less accessible party identifications.
Candidate Gender and Voter Choice: Analysis from a Multimember Preferential Voting System
Gail McElroy and Michael Marsh
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Women are greatly underrepresented in elected office. A large literature on the subject has considerably advanced our understanding of this phenomenon, but many questions remain unanswered. Using original aggregate and individual-level data, the authors explore the interplay of candidate gender, partisanship, incumbency, and campaign spending in a multimember preferential voting system. This setting allows unparalleled exploration of the heterogeneous nature of voter decision making. The authors find little evidence for an independent effect of candidate gender on voter choice. Voters do not discriminate against women even in an electoral environment that affords them this opportunity without any cost to their partisan preferences.
Serving Two Masters: Redistricting and Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives
Michael H. Crespin
December 2010
Abstract
This article explores the consequences for representation after a redistricting by reexamining the finding that members of Congress will alter their voting behavior to fit their new district. Specifically, it applies partisan theories of congressional organization to test if members are changing their behavior on all or just some votes. The results indicate that representatives adjust their roll call behavior to fit their new districts on votes that are visible to their constituents. However, when it comes to votes that are important to the party for controlling the agenda (i.e., procedural votes), members do not respond to changes in the district.
Obama and the White Vote
Todd Donovan
December 2010
ABSTRACT
This article draws on the racial threat thesis to test if white voters who lived in areas with larger African American populations were less receptive to Barack Obama in 2008. Racial context is found to structure white voters’ evaluations of Obama and, thus, affect where the Democrats gained presidential vote share over 2004. The overall Democratic swing was lower in states where a white Democrat (Hillary Clinton) had more appeal to white voters than Obama. Obama increased the Democrats’ share of the white vote, but gains were associated with positive evaluations of Obama among white voters in places with smaller African American populations. The likelihood that a white voter supported Obama also decreased as the African American population of the respondent’s congressional district increased. The results are relevant to discussions of the future of the Voting Rights Act and to conceptions of a “postracial” America.
Voters, Emotions, and Race in 2008: Obama as the First Black President
David P. Redlawsk, Caroline J. Tolbert and William Franko
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Social desirability effects make it difficult to learn voters’ racial attitudes. List experiments can tap sensitive issues without directly asking respondents to express overt opinions. The authors report on such an experiment about Barack Obama as the first black president, finding that 30 percent of white Americans were “troubled” by the prospect of Obama as the first black president. The authors examine policy and emotional underpinnings of these responses, finding that expressed emotions of anxiety and enthusiasm condition latent racial attitudes and racial policy beliefs especially for those exhibiting a social desirability bias. The results suggest that Obama’s victory despite this level of concern about race was at least in part a result of intense enthusiasm his campaign generated. This enthusiasm for Obama may have allowed some white voters to overcome latent concerns about his race. The research suggests emotions are critical in understanding racial attitudes.
Race and Turnout: Does Descriptive Representation in State Legislatures Increase Minority Voting?
Rene R. Rocha, Caroline J. Tolbert, Daniel C. Bowen and Christopher J. Clark
December 2010
ABSTRACT
The 2008 election marked an end to the longstanding gap in the level of black and white voter turnout, offering further evidence that minority empowerment affects voter turnout. In this article, the authors move beyond a dyadic conceptualization of empowerment and argue that the level of descriptive representation within the legislative body as a whole is crucial to understanding how context affects voter turnout. They find African Americans and Latinos are more likely to vote when residing in states with increased descriptive representation in the state legislature measured by the percentage of black or Latino lawmakers.
A New Measure of Group Influence in Presidential Elections: Assessing Latino Influence in 2008
Matt A. Barreto, Loren Collingwood, Sylvia Manzano
December 2010
ABSTRACT
The importance of the Latino electorate has been the subject of both academic inquiry and media discourses. The question of Latino influence is frequently limited by an approach that focuses on single variable considerations (e.g., voter turnout or ethnic-targeted campaign spending) that are often contest-specific idiosyncrasies. Relying on theoretically appropriate concepts, the authors measure Latino political influence as a function of three factors: in-group population traits, electoral volatility, and mobilization. Using the 2008 presidential election, the authors demonstrate the utility of incorporating a multifaceted measure that accounts for the contemporary complexity within the electoral environment. Because this framework is rooted in theoretical concepts, as opposed to discrete group or contest characteristics, it may be applied to any “influence group” in different electoral settings. Data are culled from several publicly available outlets, making it possible for scholars to replicate these measures and further investigate questions associated with group influence in American politics.
From Political Behavior
The Electoral Consequences of Skin Color: The “Hidden” Side of Race in Politics
Vesla M. Weaver
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Despite the significant role that skin color plays in material well-being and social perceptions, scholars know little if anything about whether skin color and afrocentric features influence political cognition and behavior and specifically, if intraracial variation in addition to categorical difference affects the choices of voters. Do more phenotypically black minorities suffer an electoral penalty as they do in most aspects of life? This study investigates the impact of color and phenotypically black facial features on candidate evaluation, using a nationally representative survey experiment of over 2000 whites. Subjects were randomly assigned to campaign literature of two opposing candidates, in which the race, skin color and features, and issue stance of candidates was varied. I find that afrocentric phenotype is an important, albeit hidden, form of bias in racial attitudes and that the importance of race on candidate evaluation depends largely on skin color and afrocentric features. However, like other racial cues, color and black phenotype don’t influence voters’ evaluations uniformly but vary in magnitude and direction across the gender and partisan makeup of the electorate in theoretically explicable ways. Ultimately, I argue, scholars of race politics, implicit racial bias, and minority candidates are missing an important aspect of racial bias.
From Political Psychology
The Minimal Cue Hypothesis: How Black Candidates Cue Race to Increase White Voting Participation
Gregory A. Petrow
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Racial group interests can compete in politics. One way competition may occur is when Black candidates cue racial thinking among Whites, leading to rivalry at the ballot box. I address this hypothesis with theories of identity, affect, and racial cognition. I argue that Black Congressional candidates cue these factors among Whites, leading the factors of White racial prejudice and White race liberalism to impact Whites’ voting participation. I employ logistic regression analysis of data from the American National Election Study in 1988, 1992, and 2000. The effects of racial prejudice on the predicted probability of voting occur among all Whites, as well as White Republicans, White Democrats, and White conservatives. The effects of White race liberalism occur among all Whites, as well as White Democrats and White liberals. The effects are strongest when Whites are in elections with Black candidates that are either challengers or in open seats.
From Politics and Society
Xenophobia and Left Voting
Kåre Vernby and Henning Finseraas
December 2010
ABSTRACT
In this article, the authors set out to evaluate two competing mechanisms that may account for the negative relationship between xenophobia and left voting. Xenophobia may reduce left voting because parties of the right are more conservative on issues relating to immigration and ethnic relations (the policy-bundling effect), or it may reduce left voting because many potential left voters lack sympathy with the groups to whom redistribution is thought to be directed (the anti-solidarity effect). These two mechanisms imply radically different scenarios for political competition. Using a multilevel modeling approach, the authors analyze the data compiled in fifteen different surveys carried out in ten Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2000. This study is the first to draw out the implications of these mechanisms for left voting and to subject them to empirical scrutiny in a large-scale comparative study. The results are consistent with the existence of a relatively strong policy-bundling effect; by contrast, the anti-solidarity effect is trivial in most of the surveys analyzed.
From Public Opinion Quarterly
Explaining Politics, Not Polls: Reexamining Macropartisanship with Recalibrated NES Data
James E. Campbell
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Like all surveys, the American National Election Studies (NES) imperfectly reflects population characteristics. There are well-known differences between actual and NES-reported turnout rates and between actual and NES-reported presidential vote divisions. This research seeks to determine whether the aggregate misrepresentation of turnout and vote choice affects the aggregate measurement of party identification: macropartisanship. After NES data are reweighted to correct for turnout and vote choice errors, macropartisanship is found to be more stable, to be less sensitive to short-term political conditions, and to have shifted more in the Republican direction in the early 1980s. The strength of partisanship also declined a bit more in the 1970s and rebounded a bit less in recent years than the uncorrected NES data indicate.
Generational Conflict Or Methodological Artifact? Reconsidering the Relationship between Age and Policy Attitudes in the U.S., 1984-2008
Andrew S. Fullerton and Jeffrey C. Dixon
December 2010
ABSTRACT
In light of claims of a generational conflict over age-specific policies and the current fiscal troubles of related governmental programs, this article examines Americans’ attitudes toward education, health, and Social Security spending through the use of a new methodology designed to uncover asymmetries in public opinion and disentangle age, period, and cohort effects. Based on generalized ordered logit models within a cross-classified fixed-effects framework using General Social Survey data between 1984 and 2008, we find little evidence consistent with gray peril and self-interest hypotheses suggesting that older people support spending for health care and Social Security but not education. The divide in attitudes toward education spending is the result of cohort–not age–effects. Yet these cohort effects extend to other attitudes and are asymmetrical: The so-called greatest generation (born around 1930 or earlier) is ambivalent about government spending and especially likely to say that we spend the “right amount” on health care. As people approach retirement age, they also become more likely to say that we spend the “right amount” on Social Security. The nuanced ways in which American public opinion is divided by age and cohort are uncovered only through the use of a new methodology that does not conceive of public support and opposition as symmetrical. Historical reasons for these divides, along with their contemporary implications, are discussed.
From The Forum
Advertising Trends in 2010
Erika Franklin Fowler and Travis N. Ridout
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Political advertising offers an important window on American campaigns and elections. We analyze a comprehensive database of political ads aired during the 2010 midterms to shed light on campaign strategies in this history-making election. We find that with the increase in competitive races in 2010, the volume of advertising rose too, as did its negativity. Moreover, we track the issues mentioned by each party, finding that while the parties agreed that employment was the top issue, there was also much divergence in issue priorities, with Republicans taking up some unlikely themes such as health care and “change.” The high volume of advertising in 2010 suggests a greater potential for voter learning, but the high levels of ad negativity could have had both positive and negative consequences on the electorate.
The Citizens United Election? Or Same As It Ever Was?
Michael M. Franz
December 2010
ABSTRACT
In January 2010, the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC overturned long-standing regulations governing the role of unions and corporations in sponsoring pro-candidate advocacy. Many predicted a deleterious effect on the electoral process. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, a number of questions deserve consideration. Was the observed level of outside spending abnormally high in 2010? What can we say about the potential effect of outside spending on the outcomes of House and Senate races? Moreover, what has the decision done to the power of parties and, most especially, their ability to compete with special interests in backing federal candidates? This paper investigates these questions using data from the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracked political ads in 2010. The initial evidence suggests that while interest groups were aggressive players in the air war, their impact may not have been as negative or as large as initially predicted.
Voter Turnout in the 2010 Midterm Election
Michael P. McDonald
December 2010
ABSTRACT
I place national turnout rates in historical perspective and investigate what state turnout rates may tell us about what factors are related to higher levels of voter participation. In midterm elections compared to presidential election, voter turnout is lower among all groups, but more so for young people. I discuss the implications of younger citizens’ disengagement in midterm elections in light of an increasing gap in support for the political parties’ candidates among the young and the old.
The Dynamics of Voter Preferences in the 2010 Congressional Midterm Elections
Costas Panagopoulos
December 2010
ABSTRACT
This article examines campaign dynamics and the evolution of voter preferences for congressional candidates during the 2010 midterm election cycle. Using national pre-election polls of registered voters, I show that there was meaningful change in voter preferences over the course of the campaign and that support for Democratic contenders declined considerably between early March and Election Day. The evidence I present also reveals growing support for Republican contenders was linked to developments during the campaign period. Specifically, the erosion in Obama approval, deterioration in national economic conditions and the passage of the health reform legislation appeared to fuel the Democratic downturn.
The 2010 Elections: Party Pursuits, Voter Perceptions, and the Chancy Game of Politics
Jeffrey M. Stonecash
December 2010
ABSTRACT
Forming party strategy is never easy because of the uncertainty of how the electorate will react. In 2009 and 2010, Democrats sought to address two major problems – the economy and health insurance – and hoped they would get credit for responding effectively. Quite the opposite occurred. Forming party strategy remains an art.

From British Journal of Political Science

Does Ethnic Diversity Erode Trust? Putnam’s ‘Hunkering Down’ Thesis Reconsidered

• Article author query
• sturgis p [Google Scholar]
• brunton-smith i [Google Scholar]
• read s [Google Scholar]
• allum n [Google Scholar]

Patrick Sturgis, Ian Brunton-Smith, Sanna Read and Nick Allum

November 2010

ABSTRACT

We use a multi-level modelling approach to estimate the effect of ethnic diversity on measures of generalized and strategic trust using data from a new survey in Britain with a sample size approaching 25,000 individuals. In addition to the ethnic diversity of neighbourhoods, we incorporate a range of indicators of the socio-economic characteristics of individuals and the areas in which they live. Our results show no effect of ethnic diversity on generalized trust. There is a statistically significant association between diversity and a measure of strategic trust, but in substantive terms, the effect is trivial and dwarfed by the effects of economic deprivation and the social connectedness of individuals.

From Public Opinion Quarterly

Explaining Politics, Not Polls: Reexamining Macropartisanship with Recalibrated NES Data

James E. Campbell

November 2010

ABSTRACT

Like all surveys, the American National Election Studies (NES) imperfectly reflects population characteristics. There are well-known differences between actual and NES-reported turnout rates and between actual and NES-reported presidential vote divisions. This research seeks to determine whether the aggregate misrepresentation of turnout and vote choice affects the aggregate measurement of party identification: macropartisanship. After NES data are reweighted to correct for turnout and vote choice errors, macropartisanship is found to be more stable, to be less sensitive to short-term political conditions, and to have shifted more in the Republican direction in the early 1980s. The strength of partisanship also declined a bit more in the 1970s and rebounded a bit less in recent years than the uncorrected NES data indicate.

Generational Conflict Or Methodological Artifact?: Reconsidering the Relationship between Age and Policy Attitudes in the U.S., 1984-2008

Andrew S. Fullerton and Jeffrey Dixon

November 2010

ABSTRACT

In light of claims of a generational conflict over age-specific policies and the current fiscal troubles of related governmental programs, this article examines Americans’ attitudes toward education, health, and Social Security spending through the use of a new methodology designed to uncover asymmetries in public opinion and disentangle age, period, and cohort effects. Based on generalized ordered logit models within a cross-classified fixed-effects framework using General Social Survey data between 1984 and 2008, we find little evidence consistent with gray peril and self-interest hypotheses suggesting that older people support spending for health care and Social Security but not education. The divide in attitudes toward education spending is the result of cohort–not age–effects. Yet these cohort effects extend to other attitudes and are asymmetrical: The so-called greatest generation (born around 1930 or earlier) is ambivalent about government spending and especially likely to say that we spend the “right amount” on health care. As people approach retirement age, they also become more likely to say that we spend the “right amount” on Social Security. The nuanced ways in which American public opinion is divided by age and cohort are uncovered only through the use of a new methodology that does not conceive of public support and opposition as symmetrical. Historical reasons for these divides, along with their contemporary implications, are discussed.

Evaluations Of Congress And Voting In House Elections: Revisiting the Historical Record

David R. Jones

November 2010

ABSTRACT

The literature portrays the congressional voter of the 1950s through the early 1970s as having been unwilling or unable to hold Congress electorally accountable for its collective legislative performance. In contrast, recent literature has demonstrated that in elections from 1974 onward, voters have regularly used congressional performance evaluations as part of their voting decisions. Specifically, poor evaluations of Congress lower support for candidates from the ruling majority party, all else being equal. This research note hypothesizes that Americans in the earlier era were willing and able to hold Congress electorally accountable for its collective performance in the same partisan fashion as today’s voters are, but that this behavior was obscured from previous researchers because they lacked access to appropriate empirical data. Using survey data largely unavailable to scholars of the earlier era, I find evidence supporting this hypothesis.

From Political Behavior

Personality and Political Discussion

Matthew V. Hibbing, Melinda Ritchie and Mary R. Anderson

November 2010

ABSTRACT

Political discussion matters for a wide array of political phenomena such as attitude formation, electoral choice, other forms of participation, levels of political expertise, and tolerance. Thus far, research on the underpinnings of political discussion has focused on political, social, and contextual forces. We expand upon this existing research by examining how individual personality traits influence patterns of political discussion. Drawing on data from two surveys we investigate how personality traits influence the context in which citizens discuss politics, the nature of the relationship between individuals and their discussion partners, and the influence discussion partners have on respondents’ views. We find a number of personality effects and our results highlight the importance of accounting for individual predispositions in the study of political discussion.

The Origins & Meaning of Liberal/Conservative Self-Identifications Revisited

Simon Zschirnt

November 2010

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the permanence of differences in the psychological underpinnings of ideological self-identifications. Previous research has suggested that conservatives differ from liberals insofar as their self-identifications as such are best explained as the product of a negative reaction (both to liberalism generally and to the groups associated with it in particular) rather than a positive embrace. However, this paper demonstrates that the dynamics underlying the formation of ideological self-identifications are not static reflections of inherent differences in liberal and conservative psychologies but rather evolve in response to changes in the political environment. Whereas feelings (positive or negative) toward liberalism played a decisive role in shaping individuals’ ideological self-identifications during the New Deal/Great Society era of liberal and Democratic political hegemony, the subsequent resurgence of political conservatism produced a decisive shift in the bases of liberal and conservative self-identifications. In particular, just as conservative self-identifications once primarily represented a reaction against liberalism and its associated symbols, hostility toward conservatism and its associated symbols has in recent years become an increasingly important source of liberal self-identifications.

From PS: Political Science and Politics

Symposium: Forecasts of
the 2010 Midterm Elections

Editor’s Introduction by James E. Campbell

October 2010

There is a broad consensus among
the models that the Republicans will make substantial gains in the House in the
2010 midterms. There is not a consensus, however, over how large those gains
will be. There is a 30-seat spread between the low and high end of the seat
change forecast range, with two forecasts giving an edge to Democrats in
controlling the House and three placing the odds in the Republicans’ favor.
Lewis-Beck and Tien forecast a 22-seat gain for the Republicans. Their 200
seats would leave Republicans 18 seats short of a majority. Cuzán forecasts
Republican gains of 27 to 30 seats, leaving Republicans with 205 to 208 seats
and Democrats with continued control of the House. Abramowitz predicts a
43-seat gain for the Republicans. Since he uses a 179 pre-election seat base,
this outcome would install a new Republican majority in place by five seats.
Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien predict that Republicans are likely to gain 51
seats, which would give Republicans 229 seats and a 12-seat majority. Finally,
my forecast is for Republicans to gain 51 or 52 seats, giving them a 12 or 13
seat majority. Whether Democrats or Republicans control the House in 2011,
their majority is likely to be much narrower than the current Democratic
majority. This may well present a roadblock to the Obama administration’s
legislative agenda and will quite probably make control of the House a real
question again in 2012.

What
Health Reform Teaches Us about American Politics

Lawrence R.
Jacobs

October 2010

ABSTRACT

The tumultuous journey of health reform from President
Barack Obama’s opening push in February 2009 to his bill signing in March 2010
may be inexplicable from afar. Swept into power on promises of change,
Democrats controlled the White House and enjoyed the largest Congressional
majorities in decades, and they agreed that the existing health care system
cost too much and delivered too little–stranding over 30 million with no health
insurance and leaving millions more with only inadequate coverage or dependent
on emergency rooms for urgent care. Unified party control and programmatic
agreement would seem like a veritable checklist of what was needed to pass
health reform legislation.

The
Seats in Trouble Forecast of the 2010 Elections to the U.S. House

James E. Campbella

October 2010

ABSTRACT

All indications are that 2010 will be a very good
year for Republicans. After two election setbacks, they are poised for a
comeback. Partisanship, ideology, the midterm decline from the prior
presidential surge, the partisanship of districts being defended, and even
President Obama’s approval ratings have set the stage for significant seat
gains by Republicans in the House.

How
Large a Wave? Using the Generic Ballot to Forecast the 2010 Midterm Elections

Alan I. Abramowitz

October 2010

ABSTRACT

As Election Day approaches, many political
commentators are asking whether the 2010 midterm elections could be a reprise
of 1994, when Republicans picked up eight seats in the Senate and 52 seats in
the House of Representatives to take control of both chambers for the first
time in 40 years. There is almost universal agreement that Republicans are
poised to make major gains in both the House and the Senate. And while the
GOP’s chances of gaining the 10 seats needed to take control of the upper
chamber appear remote, results from the generic ballot forecasting model
indicate that the 39 seats required to take back the House of Representatives
are well within reach.

Forecasting
House Seats from Generic Congressional Polls: The 2010 Midterm Election

Joseph Bafumia, Robert S.
Eriksona and Christopher Wleziena

October 2010

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present a forecast of the 2010
midterm House election based on information available in early July 2010. We
combine this forecast with a note of caution, explaining why electoral
circumstances might lead our forecast to err. Finally, we present guidance
regarding how to update the electoral forecast for 2010 based on new
information that will become available leading up to Election Day.

The
Referendum Model: A 2010 Congressional Forecast

Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles
Tien

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Congressional election forecasting has experienced
steady growth. Currently fashionable models stress prediction over explanation.
The independent variables do not offer a substantive account of the election
outcome. Instead, these variables are tracking variables–that is, indicators
that may trace the result but fail to explain it. The outstanding example is
the generic ballot measure, which asks respondents for whom they plan to vote
in the upcoming congressional race. While this variable correlates highly with
presidential party House seat share, it is bereft of substance. The generic
ballot measure is the archetypical tracking variable, and it holds pride of
place in the Abramowitz (2010) model. Other examples of such tracking variables
are exposed seats or lagged seats, features of the Campbell (2010) model. The difficulty with
such tracking models is twofold. First, they are not based on a theory of the
congressional vote. Second, because they are predictive models, they offer a
suboptimal forecasting instrument when compared to models specified according
to strong theory.

Will
the Republicans Retake the House in 2010?

Alfred G. Cuzána

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Historically, statistical models
for forecasting the outcome of midterm elections to the United States House of
Representatives have not been particularly successful (Jones and Cuzán 2006).
However, in what may have been a breakthrough, most models correctly predicted
that the Democrats would re-emerge as the majority party in 2006 (Cuzán 2007).
One successful model was estimated using 46 elections, beginning with 1914
(only the second time that 435 representatives, the present number, were
elected). The model was relatively simple, making use of national-level
variables only (Cuzán and Bundrick 2006). Using a similar model, I generated a
forecast for the 2010 midterm election. Forecasting the 2010 State Legislative
Elections

Forecasting the 2010 State Legislative
Elections

Carl Klarner

October 2010

ABSTRACT

This article offers forecasts made on July 22,
2010, for the 2010 state legislative elections. Most work in the election
forecasting field has been done on presidential and U.S. House elections. Less
has been done for U.S. Senate elections, and almost none for gubernatorial or
state legislative elections. This year will see much attention directed at the
43 state legislatures holding elections, because many will have the
responsibility for drawing new district lines based on the 2010 census.
Furthermore, of those chambers with elections scheduled in 2010, seven
currently contain one party with less than a 5% margin of control. With so much
at stake, these will clearly be contests to watch.

From Political
Psychology

A Tripartite Approach to Right-Wing Authoritarianism: The Authoritarianism-Conservatism-Traditionalism
Model

John Duckitt, Boris Bizumic, Stephen W. Krauss and Edna
Heled

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) has been
conceptualized and measured as a unidimensional personality construct
comprising the covariation of the three traits of authoritarian submission,
authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. However, new approaches have
criticized this conceptualization and instead viewed these three “traits” as
three distinct, though related, social attitude dimensions. Here we extend this
approach providing clear definitions of these three dimensions as ideological
attitude constructs of Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Traditionalism.
These dimensions are seen as attitudinal expressions of basic social values or
motivational goals that represent different, though related, strategies for
attaining collective security at the expense of individual autonomy. We report
data from five samples and three different countries showing that these three
dimensions could be reliably measured and were factorially distinct. The three
dimensions also differentially predicted interpersonal behaviour, social policy
support, and political party support. It is argued that conceptualizing and
measuring RWA as a set of three related ideological attitude dimensions may
better explain complex sociopolitical phenomena than the currently dominant
unidimensional personality based model.

Communication, Influence, and Informational Asymmetries among
Voters

T. K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan

October 2010

ABSSTRACT

The costs of political information vary
dramatically across individuals, and these costs help explain why some
individuals become politically expert while others demonstrate low levels of
political knowledge and awareness. An attractive alternative, particularly for
those with high information costs, is to rely on information and advice taken
from others who are politically expert. This paper focuses on the complications
that arise when the informant and the recipient do not share preferences. A
series of small group experiments show that subjects tend to weight expertise
more heavily than shared preferences in selecting informants, thereby exposing
themselves to diverse views and biased information. Experimental subjects
employ several heuristic devices in evaluating the reliability of this
information, but depending on their own levels of information, these heuristics
often lead subjects either to dismiss advice that conflicts with their own
prior judgments or to dismiss advice that comes from an informant with
divergent preferences. Hence these heuristics produce important consequences
for patterns of political influence, as well as reducing the potential for
political change.

From American
Journal of Political Science

Valuing Diversity in Political Organizations: Gender and Token
Minorities in the U.S.
House of Representatives

 Kirstin Kanthak and George A. Krause

 October 2010

ABSTRACT

Political
scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we
know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a
unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory
explains how minority group size affects how members of a political
organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues,
predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual-level
colleague valuation is greatest when the minority group is smallest. We test
this prediction using member-to-member leadership political action committee
(PAC) contributions in the U.S. House of Representatives. The results obtain
strong, albeit not uniform, support for the theory, demonstrating that the
gender gap in colleague valuations declines as preference divergence increases
in all but one instance. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the theory and
evidence indicate that women serving in the U.S. House of Representatives
receive less support from men colleagues as their ranks increase.

Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion: The
Self-Reinforcing Link Between Economic Inequality and Mass Preferences

Nathan J. Kelly and Peter K. Enns

October 2010

ABSTRACT

This
article assesses the influence of income inequality on the public’s policy
mood. Recent work has produced divergent perspectives on the relationship
between inequality, public opinion, and government redistribution. One group of
scholars suggests that unequal representation of different income groups
reproduces inequality as politicians respond to the preferences of the rich.
Another group of scholars pays relatively little attention to distributional
outcomes but shows that government is generally just as responsive to the poor
as to the rich. Utilizing theoretical insights from comparative political
economy and time-series data from 1952 to 2006, supplemented with
cross-sectional analysis where appropriate, we show that economic inequality
is, in fact, self-reinforcing, but that this is fully consistent with the idea
that government tends to respond equally to rich and poor in its policy
enactments.

From
The Journal of Politics

“An
Appeal to the People”: Public Opinion and Congressional Support for the Supreme
Court

Joseph Daniel Ura and Patrick C.
Wohlfarth

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Scholars
often assert that public support for judicial authority induces Congress to
grant resources and discretion to the Supreme Court. However, the theory of
competing public agency embraced by the Constitution suggests that public
support for courts cannot, by itself, explain congressional support for
judicial authority. Instead, the logic of the separation of powers system
indicates that legislative support for the institutional capacity of courts will
be a function of public confidence in the legislature as well as evaluations of
the judiciary. We test this theory, finding that public confidence in both
Congress and the Court significantly affect congressional support for the
Supreme Court, controlling for the ideological distance between the Court and
Congress as well as the Court’s workload. The results offer a more refined and
complex view of the role of public sentiment in balancing institutional power
in American politics.

Engaging
Citizens: The Role of Power-Sharing Institutions

Miki Caul Kittilson and Leslie
Schwindt-Bayer

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Drawing
on established theories of comparative political institutions, we argue that
democratic institutions carry important messages that influence mass attitudes
and behaviors. Power-sharing political institutions signal to citizens that
inclusiveness is an important principle of a country’s democracy and can
encourage citizens to participate in politics. Applying multilevel modeling to
data from the World Values Survey, we test whether democratic institutions
influence political engagement in 34 countries. Further, we examine whether
underrepresented groups, specifically women, are differentially affected by the
use of power-sharing institutions such that they are more engaged in politics
than women in countries with power-concentrating institutions. We find that
disproportional electoral rules dampen engagement overall and that gender gaps
in political engagement tend to be smaller in more proportional electoral systems,
even after controlling for a host of other factors. Power-sharing institutions
can be critical for explaining gender differences in political engagement.

Representation
and Policy Responsiveness: The Median Voter, Election Rules, and Redistributive
Welfare Spending

Shin-Goo Kang and G. Bingham
Powell Jr.

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Many
economic and social conditions shape public welfare spending. We are able to
show, however, that after taking account of these conditions, the expressed
left-right preferences of the median voters significantly affect comparative
welfare spending. These new findings support the representational claims of
liberal democracy and the theoretical expectations of the literature on
ideological congruence. However, we also show that insofar as the preferences
of citizens and the promises of governing parties (which are highly
correlated,) can be disentangled, it is the former that affect the long-term
redistributive welfare spending equilibrium, while the latter have small, but
significant short-term effects. Surprisingly, despite greater representational
correspondence between positions of voters and governments under PR than SMD,
the impact of the median voter preferences is quite similar under the two
systems.

Foreign
Policy at the Ballot Box: How Citizens Use Foreign Policy to Judge and Choose
Candidates

Shana Kushner Gadariana

October 2010

ABSTRACT

This
paper uses the elections of 1980 to 2004 to illustrate that political
candidates from opposing parties face different incentives in mentioning
foreign policy during campaigns and in taking foreign policy positions. The
paper demonstrates that citizens connect their own foreign policy views clearly
to their evaluations of Republican candidates, but these same foreign policy
opinions are much less likely to affect evaluations of the Democratic party and
Democratic candidates. In addition, this paper reveals another significant
asymmetry–in a threatening environment, Americans reward candidates and parties
perceived to hold hawkish positions but even more severely punish candidates
perceived to be dovish. Using two datasets, I find that Americans’ opinions on
defense spending and diplomacy mattered significantly for the type of political
leadership the public preferred at election time.

The
Theory of Conditional Retrospective Voting: Does the Presidential Record Matter
Less in Open-Seat Elections?

James E. Campbell, Bryan J.
Dettrey and Hongxing Yin

October 2010

ABSTRACT

This
research tests the idea that retrospective voting in presidential elections is
conditional, that retrospective evaluations are applied more strictly to
incumbents seeking election than to in-party candidates (successor candidates)
who are not incumbents. Voters may assign only partial credit or blame for
national conditions to successor candidates because, unlike incumbents, these
candidates did not personally have power over the policies that might have
affected the national conditions leading up to the election. This theory of
conditional retrospective voting is examined at both the aggregate level on elections
since 1948 and with individual-level survey data since 1972. The analysis
consistently finds, as the theory of conditional retrospective voting contends,
that the electorate’s retrospective evaluations matter significantly more to
the vote for an incumbent than to the vote for a successor candidate of the
in-party.

The
Impact of Explicit Racial Cues on Gender Differences in Support for Confederate
Symbols and Partisanship

Vincent L. Hutchings, Hanes
Walton Jr. and Andrea Benjamin

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Researchers
have argued that explicit racial appeals are rejected in contemporary American
politics because they are perceived as violating the norm of racial equality.
We test this claim with an experimental design, embedded in a representative
survey of Georgia
where, until recently, the state flag featured the Confederate battle emblem.
In our experiment, we manipulate the salience of racial cues in news accounts
of the state flag controversy in Georgia. We hypothesize that women
are more likely than men to reject explicit racial appeals. We focus on the
effects of explicit messages in two areas: support for Confederate symbols and
identification with the Democratic Party. As hypothesized, when the racial
significance of this debate is made explicit support for the Confederate flag
declines, but only among women. Similarly, explicit appeals lead to lower
levels of Democratic identification among men, but among women the effects are
weaker and less consistent.

A
Latino on the Ballot: Explaining Coethnic Voting Among Latinos and the Response
of White Americans

Corrine M. McConnaughy, Ismail K.
White, David L. Leal and Jason P. Casellas

October 2010

ABSTRACT

In
recent campaigns, candidates have sought to attract votes from the growing
Latino electorate through ethnic cues. Yet, we know very little about the
impact of appeals to ethnicity. This article examines the role that ethnic cues
play in shaping the political opinions and choices of Latinos, as well as the
response of non-Hispanic White Americans (Anglos). We take up the simplest of
group cues, the ethnicity of the candidate. We argue that candidate ethnicity
is an explicit ethnic cue that alters the political choices of Latinos through
priming of their ethnic linked fate, but only affects Anglos through spreading
activation of primed ethnic attitudes to national identity considerations.
Evidence from an experiment that manipulated exposure to candidate ethnicity
information provides evidence for these claims. Our results help to explain
coethnic voting among Latinos and resistance to Latino candidates among Anglos.

Reversing
the Causal Arrow: The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions in the
2000-2004 U.S. Presidential Election Cycle

Geoffrey Evans and Mark Pickup

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Many
economic voting models assume that individual voters’ reactions to incumbents
are strongly conditioned by their perceptions of the performance of the
macroeconomy. However, the direction of causality between economic perceptions
and political preferences is unclear: economic perceptions can be a consequence
of incumbent support rather than an influence on it. We develop the latter
thesis by examining the dynamic relationship between retrospective economic
perceptions and several measures of political preferences–approval,
partisanship, and vote–in the 2000-2004 U.S. presidential election cycle using
the ANES 2000-2002-2004 panel study to estimate structural equation model extensions
of the Anderson and Hsiao estimator for panel data. Our findings confirm that
the conventional wisdom misrepresents the relationship between retrospective
economic perceptions and incumbent partisanship: economic perceptions are
consistently and robustly conditioned by political preferences. Individuals’
economic perceptions are influenced by their political preferences rather than
vice versa.

From Electoral
Studies

How do candidates spend their money? Objects of campaign
spending and the effectiveness of diversification

Maria Laura Sudulich and Matthew
Walla

October 2010

ABSTRACT

We present a novel approach to the study of
campaign effectiveness using disaggregated spending returns from the 2007 Irish
general election. While previous studies have focused on overall levels of
expenditure as a predictor of electoral success, we consider the types of activities on which
candidates spent money and the overall diversification of candidates’ campaign
expenditure as predictors of electoral success. We offer a replicable framework
for the measurement of campaign diversification as well as for the evaluation
of its effects on electoral performance. We examine how factors such as
campaign expenditure and candidates’ incumbency status condition the effects of
campaign diversification. It is shown that diversification is only related to
electoral success when campaigns are well-financed.

Optimists and Skeptics: Why Do People Believe in the Value
of their Single Vote?

Andre Blais and Ludovic Rheault

October 2010

ABSTRACT

We investigate the origins of voters’ beliefs
about the value of their single vote. We construe such beliefs as a function of
psychological predispositions and exposure to information about the
competitiveness of the electoral race. We test this theoretical model using
data from the 2008 Canadian federal election and a new survey question tapping
voters’ beliefs about whether their vote can make a difference. Our results
show that sense of efficacy has a strong effect, efficacious voters being more
prone to optimism. Competitiveness of the race also matters, but only among
attentive voters.

Electoral Losers Revisited- How Citizens React to Defeat at
the Ballot Box

Peter
Esaiasson

October 2010

ABSTRACT

The paper seeks to reconcile insights from winner-loser
gap research with mainstream understanding of election legitimacy. The paper
acknowledges that winning and losing elections creates differential incentives
for citizens to remain supportive of their political system, but it argues that
losers nevertheless have enough reasons to remain supportive in absolute terms.
Drawing on democratic theory, the paper develops a rationale for why citizens
are willing to accept electoral defeat voluntarily, and suggest a new way to
conceptualize citizen reactions to election outcomes. It presents findings from
a sample of election studies in established democracies to show that winners
typically become more supportive whereas losers at minimum retain their level
of support from before the election. It concludes that elections, when
reasonably well executed, as they most often are in established democracies,
build system support rather than undermine it.

From Political
Behavior

The Political Ecology of Opinion in Big-Donor Neighborhoods

Brittany H.
Bramlett, James G. Gimpel and Frances E. Lee

October 2010

Abstract

Major campaign donors are highly
concentrated geographically. A relative handful of neighborhoods accounts for
the bulk of all money contributed to political campaigns. Public opinion in
these elite neighborhoods is very different from that in the country as a whole
and in low-donor areas. On a number of prominent political issues, the
prevailing viewpoint in high-donor neighborhoods can be characterized as
cosmopolitan and libertarian, rather than populist or moralistic. Merging
Federal Election Commission contribution data with three recent large-scale
national surveys, we find that these opinion differences are not solely the
result of big-donor areas’ high concentration of wealthy and educated
individuals. Instead, these neighborhoods have a distinctive political ecology
that likely reinforces and intensifies biases in opinion. Given that these
locales are the origin for the lion’s share of campaign donations, they may
steer the national political agenda in unrepresentative directions.

Partisan Differences in Opinionated News Perceptions: A Test of
the Hostile Media Effect

Lauren Feldman

October 2010

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of opinion and
overt partisanship in cable news raises questions about how audiences perceive
this content. Of particular interest is whether audiences effectively perceive
bias in opinionated news programs, and the extent to which there are partisan
differences in these perceptions. Results from a series of three online
experiments produce evidence for a relative hostile media phenomenon in the
context of opinionated news. Although, overall, audiences perceive more story
and host bias in opinionated news than in non-opinionated news, these
perceptions–particularly perceptions of the host–vary as a function of partisan
agreement with the news content. Specifically, issue partisans appear to have a
“bias against bias,” whereby they perceive less bias in opinionated news with
which they are predisposed to agree than non-partisans and especially partisans
on the other side of the issue.

An Elite Theory of Political Consulting and Its Implications for U.S. House
Election Competition

Sean A. Cain

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Does the hiring of political
consultants make election races more competitive? If so, why? Most scholars of
political consulting argue their expertise enhances competition; I argue that
consultant reputation also boosts competition. Many political consultants are
part of the Washington
establishment, which notices their association with candidates. In particular,
congressional candidates of the out party, especially challengers, have an
incentive to hire the most reputable consultants to signal to political elites
their viability. I demonstrate a positive empirical relationship between
out-party candidates hiring top consultants (compared to less reputable ones)
and how competitive their race is perceived by elites. These findings and
theoretical insight provide a basis for understanding the high costs of
political consultants and their impact on election outcomes.

Polarization and Issue Consistency Over Time

Andrew Garner and Harvey Palmer

October 2010

ABSTRACT

The polarization of the political
and social environment over the past four decades has provided citizens with
clearer cues about how their core political predispositions (e.g., group
interests, core values, and party identification) relate to their issue
opinions. A robust and ongoing scholarly debate has involved the different ways
in which the more polarized environment affects mass opinion. Using
heteroskedastic regression, this paper examines the effect of the increasingly
polarized environment on the variability of citizens’ policy opinions. We find
that citizens today base their policy preferences more closely upon their core
political predispositions than in the past. In addition, the predicted error
variances also allow us to directly compare two types of mass
polarization–issue distance versus issue consistency–to determine the
independent effects each has on changes in the distribution of mass opinion.

Education and Political Participation: Exploring the Causal Link

Adam J. Berinsky and Gabriel S. Lenz

October 2010

ABSTRACT

One of the most consistently
documented relationships in the field of political behavior is the close
association between educational attainment and political participation.
Although most research assumes that this association arises because education
causes participation, it could also arise because education proxies for the
factors that lead to political engagement: the kinds of people who participate
in politics may be the kinds of people who tend to stay in school. To test for
a causal effect of education, we exploit the rise in education levels among
males induced by the Vietnam
draft. We find little reliable evidence that education induced by the draft
significantly increases participation rates.

From The Forum

Forecasting Control of State Governments and Redistricting
Authority After the 2010 Elections

Carl Klarner, Indiana State
University

October 2010

ABSTRACT

This article makes forecasts for
the 2010 state legislative and gubernatorial elections. These forecasts
indicate the Republicans will add control of 15 legislative chambers and nine
governor’s offices, leaving them with 51 chambers and 32 governorships. Forecasts
about the extent of redistricting authority by the Democratic and Republican
parties indicate the Republicans will have authority over 125 U.S. House seats,
while the Democrats will have authority over 62. In a chamber level analysis of
2,141 legislative and a state level analysis of 758 gubernatorial elections,
four national forces are used in predicting election outcomes from 1950 to
present: presidential approval, change in per capita income, midterm loss, and
the percentage of respondents who say they will vote for a Democrat for the
U.S. House. The differential effect of these forces in states with the
straight-ticket option is also taken into account. Monte
Carlo simulation that takes into account states’ different rules
regarding redistricting authority is then utilized to assess how many U.S.
House seats the Democratic and Republican parties will control.

Building a Political Science Public Sphere with Blogs

Henry Farrell and John Sides

October 2010

ABSTRACT

We argue that political science
blogs can link conversations among political scientists with broader public
debates about contemporary issues. Political science blogs do this by
identifying relevant research, explaining its findings, and articulating its
applicability. We identify strategies besides blogging that individual scholars
and the discipline could undertake to enhance its public profile.

Political Science and Practical Politics: A Journalist’s Journey

Rhodes Cook

October 2010

ABSTRACT

Political journalism can serve as
a useful bridge between practical politics and political science. This article
recounts the author’s personal journey from a childhood interest in maps,
numbers and elections to a lifetime career as a political journalist. It also
illustrates the partnership that can flourish between journalism and academe in
making sense of our nation’s political scene.

The Politics Missed by Political Science

John R. Petrocik and Frederick T. Steeper

October 2010

ABSTRACT

This essay offers some experience-based
observations about electoral phenomena that academic political science misses
because of a focus on conceptual and theoretical debates that often take pride
of place over the empirical phenomena that gave rise to the ideas and concepts
that we highly value. We suggest that academic political science is
increasingly committed to models and methods that serve a theory or an idea
more than they account for observable empirical regularities. Practitioner
methods and innovations for persuading voters and winning elections under
varying electoral conditions are largely unknown to scholars, with consequences
for our collective factual knowledge and ability to test current hypotheses and
theories about elections in an appropriate wide range of circumstances.

From Perspectives on Politics

“There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama”: The Policy and Politics of American Multiracialism

Jennifer Hochschild and Vesla Mae Weaver

September 2010

ABSTRACT

For the first time in American history, the 2000 United States census allowed individuals to choose more than one race. That new policy sets up our exploration of whether and how multiracialism is entering Americans’ understanding and practice of race. By analyzing briefly earlier cases of racial construction, we uncover three factors important to understanding if and how intensely a feedback effect for racial classification will be generated. Using this framework, we find that multiracialism has been institutionalized in the federal government, and is moving toward institutionalization in the private sector and other governmental units. In addition, the small proportion of Americans who now define themselves as multiracial is growing absolutely and relatively, and evidence suggests a continued rise. Increasing multiracial identification is made more likely by racial mixture’s growing prominence in American society–demographically, culturally, economically, and psychologically. However, the politics side of the feedback loop is complicated by the fact that identification is not identity. Traditional racial or ethnic loyalties and understandings remain strong, including among potential multiracial identifiers. Therefore, if mixed-race identification is to evolve into a multiracial identity, it may not be at the expense of existing group consciousness. Instead, we expect mixed-race identity to be contextual, fluid, and additive, so that it can be layered onto rather than substituted for traditional monoracial commitments. If the multiracial movement successfully challenges the longstanding understanding and practice of “one drop of blood” racial groups, it has the potential to change much of the politics and policy of American race relations.

How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting

Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin

September 2010

ABSTRACT

Using the news controversy over the community group ACORN, we illustrate the way that the media help set the agenda for public debate and frame the way that debate is shaped. Opinion entrepreneurs (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals, often working through web sites) set the story in motion as early as 2006, the conservative echo chamber orchestrated an anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, the Republican presidential campaign repeated the allegations with a more prominent platform, and the mainstream media reported the allegations without investigating their veracity. As a result, the little-known community organization became the subject of great controversy in the 2008 US presidential campaign, and was recognizable by 82 percent of respondents in a national survey. We analyze 2007-2008 coverage of ACORN by 15 major news media organizations and the narrative frames of their 647 stories during that period. Voter fraud was the dominant story frame, with 55 percent of the stories analyzed using it. We demonstrate that the national news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign by opinion entrepreneurs alleging controversy, even when there is little or no truth to the story. Conversely, local news media, working outside of elite national news media sources to verify the most essential facts of the story, were the least likely to latch onto the “voter fraud” bandwagon.

Varieties of  Obamaism: Structure, Agency, and the Obama Presidency

Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond S. King

September 2010

ABSTRACT

President Obama’s record stands out among modern presidents because of the wide range between his accomplishments and the boldness of his as-yet unfulfilled promises. Obamaism is a complex phenomenon, with multiple themes and policy ends. In this paper we examine the administration’s initiatives drawing upon recent scholarship in political science to consider the political, economic and institutional constraints that Obama has faced and to assess how he has faced them. Our key theme is the importance of integrating the study of presidency and public leadership with the study of the political economy of the state. The paper argues against personalistic accounts of the Obama presidency in favor of a structured agency approach.

Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era

Suzanne Mettler

September 2010

ABSTRACT

President Barack Obama came into office with a social welfare policy agenda that aimed to reconstitute what can be understood as the “submerged state”: a conglomeration of existing federal policies that incentivize and subsidize activities engaged in by private actors and individuals. By attempting to restructure the political economy involved in taxation, higher education policy, and health care, Obama ventured into a policy terrain that presents immense obstacles to reform itself and to the public’s perception of its success. Over time the submerged state has fostered the profitability of particular industries and induced them to increase their political capacity, which they have exercised in efforts to maintain the status quo. Yet the submerged state simultaneously eludes most ordinary citizens: they have little awareness of its policies or their upwardly redistributive effects, and few are cognizant of what is at stake in reform efforts. This article shows how, in each of the three policy areas, the contours and dynamics of the submerged state have shaped the possibilities for reform and the form it has taken, the politics surrounding it, and its prospects for success. While the Obama Administration won hard-fought legislative accomplishments in each area, political success will continue to depend on how well policy design, policy delivery and political communication reveal policy reforms to citizens, so that they better understand how reforms function and what has been achieved.

Institutional Strangulation: Bureaucratic Politics and Financial Reform in the Obama Administration

Daniel Carpenter

September 2010

ABSTRACT

The politics of financial reform represent a genuine test case for American politics and its institutions. The Obama administration’s proposed reforms pit common (largely unorganized) interests against well-organized and wealthy minority interests. I describe how the withering and unfolding of financial reform has occurred not through open institutional opposition but through a quieter process that I call institutional strangulation. Institutional strangulation consists of much more than the stoppage of policies by aggregation of veto points as designed in the US Constitution. In the case of financial reform, it has non-constitutional veto points, including committee politics and cultural veto points (gender and professional finance), strategies of partisan intransigence, and perhaps most significantly, the bureaucratic politics of turf and reputation. These patterns can weaken common-interest reforms, especially in the broad arena of consumer protection.

The American Labor Movement in the Age of Obama: The Challenges and Opportunities of a Racialized Political Economy

Dorian T. Warren

September 2010

ABSTRACT

The relative weakness of the American labor movement has broader political consequences, particularly for the ambitions of the Obama presidency. Absent a strong countervailing political constituency like organized labor, well-organized and more powerful stakeholders like business and industry groups are able to exert undue influence in American democracy, thereby frustrating attempts at political reform. I argue that it is impossible to understand the current political situation confronting the Obama administration without an account of the underlying sources of labor weakness in the U.S. In such an account two factors loom especially large. One is the role of the state in structuring labor market institutions and the rules of the game for labor-business interactions. The second is the distinctively racialized character of the U.S. political economy, which has contributed to labor market segmentation, a unique political geography, and the racial division of the U.S. working class. In our current post-industrial, post-civil rights racial and economic order, whether and how the labor movement can overcome its historical racial fragmentation will determine its possibilities for renewal and ultimately its political strength in relation to the Obama presidency. If the labor movement remains an uneven and weak regional organization hobbled by racial fragmentation, the Obama Administration’s efforts to advance its core policy agenda will lack the necessary political force to be effective.

The Road to Somewhere: Why Health Reform Happened

Or Why Political Scientists Who Write about Public Policy Shouldn’t Assume They Know How to Shape It

Jacob S. Hacker

September 2010

ABSTRACT

Why did comprehensive health care reform pass in 2010? Why did it take the form it did–a form that, while undeniably ambitious, was also more limited than many advocates wanted, than health policy precedents set abroad, and than the scale of the problems it tackled? And why was this legislation, despite its limits, the subject of such vigorous and sometimes vicious attacks? These are the questions I tackle in this essay, drawing not just on recent scholarship on American politics but also on the somewhat-improbable experience that I had as an active participant in this fierce and polarized debate. My conclusions have implications not only for how political scientists should understand what happened in 2009-10, but also for how they should understand American politics. In particular, the central puzzles raised by the health reform debate suggest why students of American politics should give public policy–what government does to shape people’s lives–a more central place within their investigations. Political scientists often characterize politics as a game among undifferentiated competitors, played out largely through campaigns and elections, with policy treated mostly as an afterthought–at best, as a means of testing theories of electoral influence and legislative politics. The health care debate makes transparent the weaknesses of this approach. On a range of key matters at the core of the discipline–the role and influence of interest groups; the nature of partisan policy competition; the sources of elite polarization; the relationship between voters, activists, and elected officials; and more–the substance of public policy makes a big difference. Focusing on what government actually does has normative benefits, serving as a useful corrective to the tendency of political science to veer into discussions of matters deemed trivial by most of the world outside the academy. But more important, it has major analytical payoffs–and not merely for our understanding of the great health care debate of 2009-10.

Democracy and Distrust

A Discussion of Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust

Philippe C. Schmitter,  Donatella della Porta and Mark E. Warren

September 2010

ABSTRACT

Pierre Rosanvallon is one of the most important political theorists writing in French. Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust is a book about the limits of conventional understandings of democracy. Rosanvallon argues that while most theories of democracy focus on institutionalized forms of political participation (especially elections), the vitality of democracy rests equally on forms of “counter-democracy” through which citizens dissent, protest, and exert pressure from without on the democratic state. This argument is relevant to the concerns of a broad range of political scientists, most especially students of democratic theory, electoral and party politics, social movements, social capital, and “contentious politics.” The goal of this symposium is to invite a number of political scientists who work on these issues to comment on the book from their distinctive disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical perspectives.–Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion. By Melanye T. Price

Robert Gooding-Williams

September 2010

ABSTRACT

This is a timely, engaging, and illuminating study of Black Nationalism. The book’s “fundamental project,” Melanye T. Price writes, “is to systematically understand individual Black Nationalism adherence among African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era” (p. 60). Black Nationalism has a long history in African American politics, but with the demise of Jim Crow and the election of our first black president, we may reasonably wonder whether ordinary African American citizens are disposed to endorse it. Price’s book is important because it addresses this question head-on, defending the thesis that a renewal of Black Nationalism remains a viable possibility in post-Obama America.

Response to Robert Gooding-Williams’ review of Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion

Melanye T. Price

September 2010

ABSTRACT

In Dreaming Blackness, I had two major goals. First, I hoped to elucidate how changes in the American racial landscape have impacted African American support for black nationalism. To this end, I used a mixed methodological approach that included both statistical and qualitative analysis and allowed me to make claims based on a national cross section of African Americans and on more intimate discussions in smaller groups. Second, I wanted to ground my arguments in a robust discussion of African American political thought. This would ensure that my hypotheses and findings were resonant with a longitudinal understanding of how black nationalist ideology is characterized. Robert Gooding-Williams, with some caveats, suggests that I have accomplished these goals. I now address his two areas of concern related to evolving definitions of black nationalism and possible alternative interpretations, and I conclude by addressing our differing impressions of the future viability of this ideological option.

From Public Opinion Quarterly

Probabilistic Polling And Voting In The 2008 Presidential Election

Evidence From The American Life Panel

Adeline Delavande and Charles F. Manski

September 2010

ABSTRACT

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.

The Effect of Question Framing and Response Options on the Relationship between Racial Attitudes and Beliefs about Genes as Causes of Behavior

Eleanor Singer, Mick P. Couper, Trivellore E. Raghunathan, Toni C. Antonucci, Margit Burmeister and John Van Hoewyk

September 2010

ABSTRACT

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.

The Macro Politics of a Gender Gap

Paul M. Kellstedt, David A. M. Peterson and Mark D. Ramirez

September 2010

ABSTRACT

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.

“Sour Grapes” or Rational Voting? Voter Decision Making Among Thwarted Primary Voters in 2008

Michael Henderson, D. Sunshine Hillygus and Trevor Tompson

September 2010

ABSTRACT

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.

Political Parties and Value Consistency in Public Opinion Formation

Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus and Lise Togeby

September 2010

ABSTRACT

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.

The Polls–Trends

Attitudes About The American Dream

Sandra L. Hanson and John Zogby

ABSTRACT

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.

From American Political Science Review

Leapfrog Representation and Extremism: A Study of American Voters and Their Members in Congress

Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron

September 2010

ABSTRACT

We consider the relationship between the preferences of American voters and the preferences of the U.S. legislators who represent them. Using an Internet-based, national opinion survey in conjunction with legislator voting records from the 109th and 110th Congresses, we show that members of Congress are more extreme than their constituents, i.e., that there is a lack of congruence between American voters and members of Congress. We also show that when a congressional legislator is replaced by a new member of the opposite party, one relative extremist is replaced by an opposing extremist. We call this leapfrog representation, a form of representation that leaves moderates with a dearth of representation in Congress. We see evidence of leapfrog representation in states and House districts and in the aggregate as well: the median member of the 109th House was too conservative compared to the median American voter, yet the median of the 110th House was too liberal. Thus, the median American voter was leapfrogged when the 109th House transitioned to the 110th. Although turnover between the 109th and 110th Senates occurred at approximately the same rate as between the 109th and 110th Houses, the Senate appears to be a more moderate institution whose median member does not move as abruptly as that of the House.

From Politics and Society

Economic Ideas and the Political Process: Debating Tax Cuts in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1962-1981

Elizabeth Popp Berman and Nicholas Pagnucco

September 2010

ABSTRACT

While sociologists and political scientists have become interested in the role of ideas in the political process, relatively little work looks at how ideological claims are actually deployed in political discourse. This article examines the economic claims made in two pairs of Congressional debates over tax cuts, one (in 1962 and 1964) generally associated with Keynesian economic theories, and one (in 1978 and 1981) tied to supply-side ideas. While these bills were indeed initiated by groups subscribing to different economic ideologies, subsequent debates look surprisingly similar. The bills were closer in substance than one might expect, and while their proponents came from opposite political camps, in both cases supporters focused more on supply-side than demand-side effects and emphasized tax cuts’ ability to pay for themselves through economic stimulation. The authors propose that politically acceptable economic claims may evolve more slowly than the economic theories that inspire policy entrepreneurs, and that this “discursive opportunity structure” may not only constrain the political process but may potentially shape the political effects of expert knowledge.

Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the Liberal State

Antje Ellermann

September 2010

ABSTRACT

This article explores the possibility of resistance under conditions of extreme state power in liberal democracies. It examines the strategies of migrants without legal status who, when threatened with one of the most awesome powers of the liberal state–expulsion–shed their legal identity in order to escape the state’s reach. Remarkably, in doing so, they often succeed in preventing the state from exercising its sovereign powers. The article argues that liberal states are uniquely constrained in their dealing with undocumented migrants. Not only are they forced to operate within the constraints of the international legal order–making repatriation contingent on the possession of identity documents–but the liberal state is also constitutionally limited in its exercise of coercion against the individual. The article concludes that it is those individuals who have the weakest claims against the liberal state that are most able to constrain its exercise of sovereignty.

From Perspectives on Politics

How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting

Peter Dreir and Christopher R. Martin

August 2010

ABSTRACT

Using the news controversy over the community group ACORN, we illustrate the way that the media help set the agenda for public debate and frame the way that debate is shaped. Opinion entrepreneurs (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals, often working through web sites) set the story in motion as early as 2006, the conservative echo chamber orchestrated an anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, the Republican presidential campaign repeated the allegations with a more prominent platform, and the mainstream media reported the allegations without investigating their veracity. As a result, the little-known community organization became the subject of great controversy in the 2008 US presidential campaign, and was recognizable by 82 percent of respondents in a national survey. We analyze 2007-2008 coverage of ACORN by 15 major news media organizations and the narrative frames of their 647 stories during that period. Voter fraud was the dominant story frame, with 55 percent of the stories analyzed using it. We demonstrate that the national news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign by opinion entrepreneurs alleging controversy, even when there is little or no truth to the story. Conversely, local news media, working outside of elite national news media sources to verify the most essential facts of the story, were the least likely to latch onto the “voter fraud” bandwagon.

From Political Psychology

Ethnic Minority-Majority Asymmetry in National Attitudes around the World: A Multilevel Analysis

Christian Staerkle, Jim Sidanius, Eva G. T. Green and Ludwig E. Molina

August 2010

ABSTRACT

Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, this research investigated asymmetric attitudes of ethnic minorities and majorities towards their country and explored the impact of human development, ethnic diversity, and social inequality as country-level moderators of national attitudes. In line with the general hypothesis of ethnic asymmetry, we found that ethnic, linguistic, and religious majorities were more identified with the nation and more strongly endorsed nationalist ideology than minorities (H1, 33 countries). Multilevel analyses revealed that this pattern of asymmetry was moderated by country-level characteristics: the difference between minorities and majorities was greatest in ethnically diverse countries and in egalitarian, low inequality contexts. We also observed a larger positive correlation between ethnic subgroup identification and both national identification and nationalism for majorities than for minorities (H2, 20 countries). A stronger overall relationship between ethnic and national identification was observed in countries with a low level of human development. The greatest minority-majority differences in the relationship between ethnic identification and national attitudes were found in egalitarian countries with a strong welfare state tradition.

“I’m Not Prejudiced, but . . .”: Compensatory Egalitarianism in the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary

Corinne Moss-Racusin, Julie Phelan and Laurie Rudman

August 2010

ABSTRACT

The historic 2008 Democratic presidential primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton posed a difficult choice for egalitarian White voters, and many commentators speculated that the election outcome would reflect pitting the effects of racism against sexism (Steinem, 2008). Because self-reported prejudices may be untrustworthy, we used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess White adults’ (1) condemnation of prejudices, and (2) attitudes toward the candidates in relation to voting decisions, as part of an online survey. Results supported the proposed compensatory egalitarianism process, such that Whites’ voting choice was consistent with their implicit candidate preference, but in an effort to remain egalitarian, participants compensated for this preference by automatically condemning prejudice toward the other candidate’s group. Additional findings showed that this process was moderated by participants’ ethnicity and level of prejudice, as expected. Specifically, compensatory egalitarianism occurred primarily among Whites and individuals low in explicit prejudice. Implications for candidate support, aversive racism theory, and implicit compensation processes are discussed.

The Affective Tipping Point: Do Motivated Reasoners Ever “Get It”?

David P. Redlawsk, Andrew J. W. Civettini and Karen M. Emmerson

August 2010

ABSTRACT

In order to update candidate evaluations voters must acquire information and determine whether that new information supports or opposes their candidate expectations. Normatively, new negative information about a preferred candidate should result in a downward adjustment of an existing evaluation. However, recent studies show exactly the opposite; voters become more supportive of a preferred candidate in the face of negatively valenced information. Motivated reasoning is advanced as the explanation, arguing that people are psychologically motivated to maintain and support existing evaluations. Yet it seems unlikely that voters do this ad infinitum. To do so would suggest continued motivated reasoning even in the face of extensive disconfirming information. In this study we consider whether motivated reasoning processes can be overcome simply by continuing to encounter information incongruent with expectations. If so, voters must reach a tipping point after which they begin more accurately updating their evaluations. We show experimental evidence that such an affective tipping point does in fact exist. We also show that as this tipping point is reached, anxiety increases, suggesting that the mechanism that generates the tipping point and leads to more accurate updating may be related to the theory of affective intelligence. The existence of a tipping point suggests that voters are not immune to disconfirming information after all, even when initially acting as motivated reasoners.

The Implicit and Explicit Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: Is the Source Really Blamed?

Luciana Carraro and Luigi Castelli

August 2010

ABSTRACT

Despite the widespread use of negative campaigns, research has not yet provided unambiguous conclusions about their effects. So far studies, however, have mainly focused on very explicit measures. The main goal of the present work was to explore the effects of different types of negative campaigns on both implicit and explicit attitudes, as well as in relation to two basic dimensions of social perception, namely competence and warmth. Across a series of three studies, we basically showed that not all negative campaigns lead to the same consequences. Specifically, especially personal attacks toward the opposing candidate may backfire at the explicit level. More interestingly, at an implicit level, the reliance on negative messages was associated with more negative spontaneous affective responses toward the source, but also with a spontaneous conformity to such a source. Overall, it appeared that negative messages decreased the perceived warmth of the source while simultaneously increasing the perceived competence. Results are discussed by focusing on the importance of implicit measures in political psychology and on the crucial role of perceived competence.

From Political Behavior

Sex and Race: Are Black Candidates More Likely to be Disadvantaged by Sex Scandals?

Adam J. Berinsky, Vincent L. Hutchings, Tali Mendelberg, Lee Shaker and Nicholas A. Valentino

August 2010

ABSTRACT

A growing body of work suggests that exposure to subtle racial cues prompts white voters to penalize black candidates, and that the effects of these cues may influence outcomes indirectly via perceptions of candidate ideology. We test hypotheses related to these ideas using two experiments based on national samples. In one experiment, we manipulated the race of a candidate (Barack Obama vs. John Edwards) accused of sexual impropriety. We found that while both candidates suffered from the accusation, the scandal led respondents to view Obama as more liberal than Edwards, especially among resentful and engaged whites. Second, overall evaluations of Obama declined more sharply than for Edwards. In the other experiment, we manipulated the explicitness of the scandal, and found that implicit cues were more damaging for Obama than explicit ones.

In the Eye of the Beholder? Motivated Reasoning in Disputed Elections Kyle C. Kopko,

Sarah McKinnon Bryner, Jeffrey Budziak, Christopher J. Devine and Steven P. Nawara

August 2010

ABSTRACT

This study uses an experimental design to simulate the ballot counting process during a hand-recount after a disputed election. Applying psychological theories of motivated reasoning to the political process, we find that ballot counters’ party identification conditionally influences their ballot counting decisions. Party identification’s effect on motivated reasoning is greater when ballot counters are given ambiguous, versus specific, instructions for determining voter intent. This study’s findings have major implications for ballot counting procedures throughout the United States and for the use of motivated reasoning in the political science literature.

Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans’ Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties

Nicholas J. G. Winter

August 2010

ABSTRACT

During the past three decades Americans have come to view the parties increasingly in gendered terms of masculinity and femininity. Utilizing three decades of American National Election Studies data and the results of a cognitive reaction-time experiment, this paper demonstrates empirically that these connections between party images and gender stereotypes have been forged at the explicit level of the traits that Americans associate with each party, and also at the implicit level of unconscious cognitive connections between gender and party stereotypes. These connections between the parties and masculinity and femininity have important implications for citizens’ political cognition and for the study of American political behavior.