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When do groups—be they countries, administrations, or other organizations—more or less accurately understand the world around them and assess political choices? Some argue that group decision-making processes often fail due to biases induced by groupthink. Others argue that groups, by aggregating knowledge, are better at analyzing the foreign policy world. To advance knowledge about the intersection of politics and group decision making, this paper draws on evidence from a multiyear geopolitical forecasting tournament with thousands of participants sponsored by the US government. We find that teams outperformed individuals in making accurate geopolitical predictions, with regression discontinuity analysis demonstrating specific teamwork effects. Moreover, structural topic models show that more cooperative teams outperformed less cooperative teams. These results demonstrate that information sharing through groups, cultivating reasoning to hedge against cognitive biases, and ensuring all perspectives are heard can lead to greater success for groups at forecasting and understanding politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by police as whites. This paper examines whether this racial disparity is due in part to racial differences in the circumstances of police killings. To assess whether and how these circumstances predict the race of a decedent, I use machine learning techniques and a novel data set of police killings containing over 120 descriptors. I find that decedent characteristics, criminal activity, threat levels, police actions, and the setting of the lethal interaction are not predictive of race, indicating that the police—given contact—are killing blacks and whites under largely similar circumstances. The findings suggest that the racial disparity in the rate of lethal force is most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some social and economic problems do not gain broad awareness. Yet others become prominent (and perhaps are alleviated) in part because they successfully engage the wider citizenry. In this paper, we investigate how the evidence used to describe problems affects public engagement. Using disparities in access to affordable health care—a focal aspect of economic inequality in the United States—as our main issue, we conduct a series of field and survey experiments showing how some forms of evidence reduce attitudinal and behavioral engagement while other forms increase them. Our results challenge common arguments about political communication and behavior, while also shedding new light on a central question in the study of politics: What determines when citizens become concerned about a social problem? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large numbers of Americans endorse political rumors on surveys. But do they truly believe what they say? In this paper, I assess the extent to which subscription to political rumors represents genuine beliefs as opposed to expressive responses--rumor endorsements designed to express opposition to politicians and policies rather than genuine belief in false information. I ran several experiments, each designed to reduce expressive responding on two topics: among Republicans on the question of whether Barack Obama is a Muslim and among Democrats on whether members of the federal government had advance knowledge about 9/11. The null results of all experiments lead to the same conclusion: the incidence of expressive responding is very small, though somewhat larger for Democrats than Republicans. These results suggest that survey responses serve as a window into the underlying beliefs and true preferences of the mass public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisanship increasingly factors into the behavior of Americans in both political and nonpolitical situations, yet the bounds of partisan prejudice are largely unknown. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the limits of partisan prejudice using a series of five studies situated within a typology of prejudice. We find that partisan prejudice predicts suppression of hostile rhetoric toward one’s own party, avoidance of members of the opposition, and a desire for preferential treatment for one’s own party. While these behaviors may cause incidental or indirect harm to the opposition, we find that even the most affectively polarized—those with the strongest disdain for the opposition—are no more likely to intentionally harm the opposition than those with minimal levels of affective polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raising the opportunity cost of people’s time may reduce their commitment to social obligations such as voting. Notably, entertaining sporting events can be strong civic distractions, as commentators throughout history have lamented. To consider sporting events’ influence on political behavior, this paper examines the effect of Monday Night Football games the day before US general elections from 1970 to 2014. More attractive games, such as those that feature more prominent and competitive match-ups or that feature local or high-scoring teams, may entice people to consume more entertainment and thus have less time to devote to civic affairs. When preelection football game quality increases from its 25th to 75th percentile, voter turnout falls by between 2 and 8 percentage points. These effects are somewhat weaker among those more interested in politics and do not appear in placebo tests on other political behaviors occurring before the preelection game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American employers are increasingly engaging their workers in the political process. Drawing on original surveys of firms and workers, this paper examines the extent to which employers act as political machines, channeling their employees into politics in ways intended to support corporate interests. I show that employer political requests greatly increased the likelihood that employees would report participating in politics around the 2014 election and employer requests were roughly as effective as those from unions and political parties. I also find that employer mobilization was most effective when employers used warnings of job loss to motivate participation and when employers could monitor the behavior of their employees, suggesting that employers are indeed acting as a type of political machine. My results shed light on the ways that American firms recruit workers into politics and show that employer mobilization of workers may be an important source of political power for business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 election renewed interest in the Wilder or Bradley effect, the gap between the share of survey respondents expressing support for a candidate and the candidate's vote share. Using new data from 180 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006, this paper presents the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect. It demonstrates a significant Wilder effect only through the early 1990s, when Wilder himself was Governor of Virginia. Evidence from the 2008 presidential election reinforces this claim. Although the same mechanisms could affect female candidates, this paper finds no such effect at any point in time. It also shows how polls' overestimation of front-runners' support can exaggerate estimates of the Wilder effect. Together, these results accord with theories emphasizing how short-term changes in the political context influence the role of race in statewide elections. The Wilder effect is the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to underrepresented groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the debate between the ''consensus'' school of American politics and its various critics, all participants have shown themselves capable of shedding light on different historical periods or particular political conflicts; and, of course, given the complexity of public discourse, many American political controversies lend themselves to elucidation by more than one of them. This paper's purpose is to suggest yet a further way of interpreting American political discourse, one that carries the capacity to illuminate a kind of discursive structure in American politics that goes undiscerned by both the consensus school and its critics. The paper illustrates this alternative approach by using it to interpret discourse leading up to and following the 1996 welfare reforms. It concludes by suggesting that since welfare debate lends itself well to this interpretation, the question of whether other American political debates might also do so is a worthwhile project for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an interpretation of the uncertainty that exists on election morning as to who will win. It is based on the theory that there are a number of possible conditions of nature that can exist on election day, of which one is drawn. Political betting markets provide a way of trying to estimate this uncertainty. This type of uncertainty is different from polling standard errors, which estimate sample-size uncertainty. This paper also introduces a ranking assumption concerning dependencies across U.S. states. The assumption does well when tested using data for the 2004 presidential election and the 2006 Senate election. It is shown that if the ranking assumption is correct, the two political parties should spend all their money on a few states, which seems consistent with their actual behavior in 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of any important political decision are always to some degree uncertain. This uncertainty may be ameliorated by the collection of policy-relevant information. Predictably, if such information is biased, then political decisions based on that information will be biased as well. This paper explores the converse of this statement: if the policymaker is biased, will the information provided to him or her also be biased? It is shown in this paper that, in equilibrium, information provided to a sufficiently biased policymaker will inherit the policymaker's bias. Accordingly, the provision of biased policy-relevant information is not evidence of an attempt to produce biased policy decisions. The implications of the theory are examined within the context of modern administrative policymaking within the United States Federal Government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of multicandidate races in U.S. presidential elections motivated the modern invention and advocacy of approval voting; but it has not previously been recognized that the first four presidential elections (1788–1800) were conducted using a variant of approval voting. That experiment ended disastrously in 1800 with the infamous Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Burr. The tie, this paper shows, resulted less from miscalculation than from a strategic tension built into approval voting, which forces two leaders appealing to the same voters to play a game of Chicken. Because the Burr Dilemma poses a significant difficulty for approval voting, this paper urges that researchers give more attention to “instant runoff” reform options, especially the alternative vote and the Coombs rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relative performance of voting technologies by studying presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial election returns across hundreds of counties in the United States from 1988 to 2000. Relying on a fixed-effects regression applied to an unbalanced panel of counties, we find that in presidential elections, traditional paper ballots produce the lowest rates of uncounted votes (i.e.,“residual votes”), followed by optically scanned ballots, mechanical lever machines, direct register electronic machines (DREs), and punch cards. In gubernatorial and senatorial races, paper, optical scan ballots, and DREs are significantly better in minimizing the residual vote rate than mechanical lever machines and punch cards. If all jurisdictions in the United States that used punch cards in 2000 had used optically scanned ballots instead, we estimate that approximately 500,000 more votes would have been attributed to presidential candidates nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the so-called "perquisites/constituency service" hypothesis that purports to explain incumbents' electoral margins in congressional elections. First, it reviews the individual-level and aggregate-level studies, pointing out serious problems in measurements and methodology and concluding that existing literature does not and cannot support the thesis Second, using 1984 CPS/NES data, the paper models the voting decisions in 1984, finding that respondents' decisions were affected by shared partisanship with the incumbent, ideological compatibility, challenger spending, assessments of President Reagan, and (a dubiously measured) recollection of the incumbent's having done something for the district. Individual casework experience did not affect the voting decision. Third, with data gathered from over 200 House offices, the percentage of the vote won by incumbents in the 1982 election is modeled as a function of 1982 casework loads, staff allocation, mailings, and several baseline variables. The findings are that casework loads, trips home, and mailings did not affect the vote, but that district partisanship and ideology, redistricting, national electoral tides, and occasionally district education levels did. We conclude that, based on existing evidence, the perquisites and casework hypotheses have not been demonstrated and that to explore the theses further panel data are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using the development of the appropriations process in the House between 1865 and 1921 to generate a series of cases, this paper explores one way in which two congressional research paths, rational choice theory, and historical analysis, can be joined. The theory section specifies four types of structural strategies that rational members of Congress might pursue in order to make particular substantive outcomes more likely expansionary fragmentation, retrenching centralization, expansionary centralization, and retrenching fragmentation. The empirical section of the paper examines episodes in the House between 1865 and 1921 when each of the four structural strategies was pursued Expansionary fragmentation is the most common strategy during this period, confirming conventional wisdom concerning congressional budgeting. But the exact opposite strategy--retrenching centralization--had its persistent supporters who were frequently successful at instituting reform. Finally, the other two strategies--expansionary centralization and retrenching fragmentation--were pursued less frequently during this period, but their pursuit still demonstrated a rational response to different decisional contexts. The general findings of the paper suggest that the marriage of rational choice and historical analysis in the study of Congress can be a fruitful one, with each mode of inquiry elucidating and extending the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Rawls's Political Liberalism asserts that liberal politics can and should be conducted without engaging debates about the truth of its theoretical foundations. This paper argues that political liberalism is in fact far more concerned with questions of truth than Rawls was willing to admit. Once political liberalism's relation to truth claims is understood more clearly, it becomes evident that political liberalism is closer to its Enlightenment predecessor than Rawls claimed, and that affinity with the Enlightenment enables a reevaluation of political liberalism's position on the place of religious argument in political debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these different groups of votes. To conduct our analysis we focus on all roll calls on the 13 annual appropriations bills across eight congresses. When we concentrate on these smaller issue areas, we find that voting is multidimensional and members do not vote in a consistent ideological fashion across all issue areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One mystery of U.S. politics is why the president's party regularly loses congressional seats at midterm. Although presidential coattails and their withdrawal provide a partial explanation, coattails cannot account for the fact that the presidential party typically performs worse than normal at midterm. This paper addresses the midterm vote separate from the presidential year vote, with evidence from generic congressional polls conducted during midterm election years. Polls early in the midterm year project a normal vote result in November. But as the campaign progresses, vote preferences almost always move toward the out party. This shift is not a negative referendum on the president, as midterms do not show a pattern of declining presidential popularity or increasing salience of presidential performance. The shift accords with ''balance'' theory, where the midterm campaign motivates some to vote against the party of the president in order to achieve policy moderation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though forgotten by history, the 1935 Gold Clause cases concerning abrogation of gold-indexed bonds were instantly dubbed historical landmarks. Perry v. U.S., the case addressing federal bond contracts, should be remembered as an important instance of strategic judicial retreat. Expecting that the wrong outcome would provoke an attack and harm its legitimacy, the Supreme Court granted the administration an important technical victory. This paper elucidates three conditions necessary for retreat: (1) very strong government outcome preferences, (2) signals of a direct attack, and (3) an environment which makes these threats credible. It compares the Gold Clause cases with a control case, U.S. v. Butler. It shows that the former strongly met the conditions while the latter, in which the Court made a sincere decision, did not. Finally, it refutes legal and attitudinal explanations and argues that the Perry opinion was written to grudgingly reach the strategically necessary result by granting a technical victory in the remedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that the American people are woefully ignorant about law and courts. In light of this putative ignorance, scholars and other commentators have questioned whether the public should play a role in the judicial process¿for example, whether public preferences should matter for U.S. Supreme Court confirmation processes. Unfortunately, however, much of what we know¿or think we know¿ about public knowledge of the Supreme Court is based upon flawed measures and procedures. So, for instance, the American National Election Study, a prominent source of the conclusion that people know little if anything about the U.S. Supreme Court, codes as incorrect the reply that William Rehnquist is (was) a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court; respondents, to be judged knowledgeable, must identify Rehnquist as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (which, of course, technically, he was not). More generally, the use of open-ended recall questions leads to a serious and substantial underestimation of the extent to which ordinary people know about the nation's highest court. Our purpose in this paper is to revisit the question of how knowledgeable the American people are about the Supreme Court. Based on two national surveys¿ using more appropriate, closed-ended questions¿we demonstrate that levels of knowledge about the Court and its justices are far higher than nearly all earlier surveys have documented. And, based on an experiment embedded in one of the national surveys, we also show the dramatic effect of question-form on estimates of levels of knowledge. Finally, we draw out the implications of political knowledge for the degree to which people support the U.S. Supreme Court. Our findings indicate that greater knowledge of the Court is associated with stronger loyalty toward the institution. We conclude by reconnecting these findings to ''positivity theory,'' which asserts that paying attention to courts not only provides citizens information, but also exposes them to powerful symbols of judicial legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have investigated the diffusion of public policies, often focusing on the ways in which learning among governments influences that process. We know relatively little, however, about those policies that diffuse very rapidly, rather than in the familiar S-shaped distribution associated with policy learning, or about what causes variation in temporal diffusion patterns. This study focuses on policy characteristics as a way to develop a priori expectations about the diffusion patterns of public policies. It argues that the salience and complexity of an issue condition lawmakers' willingness to discount long-term consequences in favor of short-term electoral gain and, thus, to forgo policy learning in favor of immediate adoption. It tests those expectations in an analysis of 57 previously studied policies that diffused between 1850 and 2001 and finds evidence that salience increases the likelihood of rapid diffusion, particularly in noncomplex policies. The paper also explores the causal mechanisms behind these empirical findings in a case study of two policy adoption decisions in California. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, this paper investigates the characteristics of white Southern constituencies that reelected racial liberals to the U.S. House in the period between the 1948 Democratic Convention and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. In doing so, it tests theories of Southern politics and the electoral connection. Further, it also addresses several methodological issues regarding inferences made from comparative-historical research. Ultimately, it reveals that racial liberals from the Peripheral South and the cities of the Deep South were able to establish bonds between themselves and their constituents that were sufficient to win reelection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that presidential leadership tends to exacerbate partisan disagreement in Congress on the issues the president champions. The argument starts from the president's role as highly visible party leader. Because of this role, members of Congress of both parties have a collective political stake in the disposition of presidential initiatives: members of the president's party tend to benefit politically from presidential successes, while members of the opposing party receive few political benefits and may suffer costs. These political incentives are likely to drive the parties in Congress farther apart on presidential initiatives than they would be in the absence of presidential leadership. To test for these effects, this paper controls for variation in issue content and isolates for separate analysis votes involving ideologically divisive issues. Analysis reveals that the parties are systematically farther apart on presidential agenda items, controlling for issue content and other factors affecting voting partisanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of higher education diversity for both African Americans and Latinos, by investigating how the structure of the bureaucracy affects the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation. The key theoretical determinants of minority college enrollments are legislative representation, bureaucratic structure, university-level policies, and restrictions on affirmative action. A hierarchical linear model of 500+ universities over an 11-year period shows that each of these factors affects minority enrollments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Hispanic voting behavior in the 2004 Presidential election. Our research makes a significant contribution to the literature on Hispanic politics, as this is the first study to apply theories of issue and economic voting to a nationwide sample of Hispanic voters. We demonstrate that, similar to Anglos, issues and ideology were highly influential in the vote choice of Hispanics in the 2004 election. However, using the best available data on Hispanic voting behavior for this election, a statewide aggregation of the National Election Pool (NEP), we demonstrate that in this election Hispanic voters placed more emphasis on moral values issues and national security than on traditional domestic issues such as the economy and education. This accounted for Republican gains beyond the overall increase in Bush's vote share from 2000 to 2004. We also show that moral values and national security had roughly equal importance in Bush's victory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the manner and extent to which differences in militaristic orientations occupy an important front in the much ballyhooed American "culture war." In particular, we posit that belief in biblical inerrancy engenders a "messianic" militarism. We further suggest that this relationship occurs not only directly but also indirectly, through a heightened sense of nationalism. We compare the predictive capacity of such traditionalistic Christian "believing" to other elements associated with it: (1) cognitive dogmatism, (2) hierarchical visions of authority, (3) devotionalism, and (3) immersion within the traditionalistic Christian culture. Finally, we demonstrate the relevance of these dynamics to understanding "red/blue" cleavage structures in the United States, by showing that as belief in the authority of the Bible increases, so does the perceived electoral salience of foreign policy issues, relative to domestic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When women run in general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, they win at approximately the same rates as their male counterparts. With the exception of studies of selected congressional districts in particular years, however, scholars have virtually ignored the gender dynamics of the congressional primary process. In this paper, we fill this void, analyzing data from 1958 to 2004 to test hypotheses about women's victory rates and levels of primary competition. Our analysis results in an additional explanation for women's underrepresentation: the congressional primary process. Although women generally do not win primaries at lower rates than their male counterparts, women in both parties face more primary competition than do men. Gender neutral victory rates, then, are not the result of a gender neutral primary process. Women have to be "better" than their male counterparts in order to fare equally well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An enduring and controversial debate centers on whether there exist "two presidencies," that is, whether presidents exercise fundamentally greater influence over foreign than domestic affairs. This paper makes two contributions to understanding this issue and, by extension, presidential power more generally. First, we distill an institutional logic that both supports the two presidencies thesis and implies that Congress has incentives to delegate foreign policy powers to the president. Accordingly, the logic suggests that empirical analysis should incorporate these incentives. Our second contribution, then, is to test for the existence of two presidencies in a domain that Congress cannot delegate, budgetary appropriations, and a domain that explicitly incorporates delegation, agency creation. Consistent with expectations, we find presidents exercise considerably greater influence over foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I use the Bush Administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) scores—a numerical measure of federal program performance—to analyze the relationship between political appointees and management. I find that federal programs administered by politically appointed bureau chiefs get systematically lower PART evaluations than programs run by bureau chiefs drawn from the civil service. I find that career managers have more direct bureau experience and longer tenures, and these characteristics are significantly related to performance. Political appointees have higher education levels, more private or not-for-profit management experience, and more varied work experience than careerists but these characteristics are uncorrelated with performance. I conclude that reducing the number of appointees or increased sensitivity to appointee selection based upon certain background characteristics could improve federal bureau management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between bad weather and lower levels of voter turnout is widely espoused by media, political practitioners, and, perhaps, even political scientists. Yet, there is virtually no solid empirical evidence linking weather to voter participation. This paper provides an extensive test of the claim. We examine the effect of weather on voter turnout in 14 U.S. presidential elections. Using GIS interpolations, we employ meteorological data drawn from over 22,000 U.S. weather stations to provide election day estimates of rain and snow for each U.S. county. We find that, when compared to normal conditions, rain significantly reduces voter participation by a rate of just less than 1% per inch, while an inch of snowfall decreases turnout by almost .5%. Poor weather is also shown to benefit the Republican party's vote share. Indeed, the weather may have contributed to two Electoral College outcomes, the 1960 and 2000 presidential elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For too long, research on retrospective voting has fixated on how economic trends affect incumbents' electoral prospects in national and state elections. Hundreds of thousands of elections in the United States occur at the local level and have little to do with unemployment or inflation rates. This paper focuses on the most prevalent: school boards. Specifically, it examines whether voters hold school board members accountable for the performance of their schools. The 2000 elections reveal considerable evidence that voters evaluate school board members on the basis of student learning trends. During the 2002 and 2004 school board elections, however, when media (and by extension public) attention to testing and accountability systems drifted, measures of achievement did not influence incumbents' electoral fortunes. These findings, we suggest, raise important questions about both the scope conditions of retrospective voting models and the information voters rely upon when evaluating incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the details of the discharge procedure in the House of Representatives and their implications for theories of legislative politics. While the discharge procedure is frequently cited as the tool by which committee obstruction within the House can be overcome, I argue that, under close examination, the procedure actually is far from purely majoritarian. Specifically, I argue that the details of the discharge procedure imply that the support of either the Speaker of the House or a majority of the Rules Committee is necessary to ensure floor consideration for a bill. Accordingly, in a de jure sense, the House's discharge procedure is irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The requirements of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominees present two anomalies: under what circumstances can ideologically extreme nominees win confirmation and, given political polarization and the possibility of a filibuster, how are any nominees successful? This paper employs a simple unidimensional spatial model to explore these anomalies. The principal results show that little change in Court policy is possible with a single appointment, and this fact interacts with certain contexts to give the president a relatively free hand in choosing extreme nominees. Less firm conclusions are reached about the second anomaly, but the analysis sets the stage for further work on that aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of nineteenth-century voting behavior have focused on how economic variables influenced elections during this period. Employing underutilized individual-level data from the 1870s, this paper argues that such studies overstate the influence of economic variables upon electoral behavior. Specifically, Democratic voters principally cast ballots on the basis of economic issues and divisions, while Republicans were primarily concerned with religious and cultural issues. These results suggest that the Democratic and Republican parties attracted voters on the basis of different policy dimensions, indicating that both ethnocultural and economic considerations affected both political parties, albeit in divergent ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses individual-level data to examine the impact of unions on turnout and assesses the consequences of dramatic changes in union strength and in the composition of union membership since 1964 for the composition of the U.S. electorate. We first estimate individual-level models to test for the distinct effects of union membership and union strength on the probabilities of members and nonmembers voting and then test whether the effect of individual union membership and overall union strength varies across income levels. We find that unions increase turnout of both members and nonmembers. By simulating what turnout would be were union membership at its 1964 level, we show that the decline in union membership since 1964 has affected the aggregate turnout of both low- and middle-income individuals more than the aggregate turnout of high-income individuals. However, while class bias has increased as a consequence of the decline, the change is surprisingly small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to clarify Tocqueville's view that a political order premised on the primacy of individual reason over moral authority can be detrimental to genuine intellectual liberty. Beginning with Tocqueville's famous comment that Americans are Cartesians without having read Descartes, I compare Tocqueville's assessment of American intellectual life to Descartes' hopes for future political societies. I describe their disagreement about the effect that moral authority and rational individualism have on the development of the mind and locate its source in two competing theories of mind. This reveals a debate about our human needs with echoes in contemporary political discontent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents and investigates a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third-party electoral support over the past century. We find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties—mainly left-wing third parties—declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. We note first that most of the third-party voting in the pre-New-Deal era was for left-wing third parties and that this declined sharply during the 1930s and 1940s. We then show that after the New Deal the Democratic Party's electoral support was higher in areas that had traditionally supported left-wing third parties. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we find little support for the hypothesis that the decline of third-party voting was immediately due to electoral reforms such as the introduction of direct primaries and the Australian ballot, except possibly in the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the struggle between the legislative and judicial branches by focusing specifically on congressional influences on the behavior of federal judges. We argue that Congress may constrain individual judicial behavior by passing statutes containing detailed language. To test this thesis we borrow from the bureaucratic politics literature to introduce and test a new measure of statutory constraint. Using data from the U.S. Courts of Appeals we find that appellate court behavior is constrained significantly by statutory language, although this constraint is asymmetric across ideology. We discover substantial differences between Democratic and Republican appointees both in terms of statutory constraint and ideological voting. The data indicate judges appointed by Democratic presidents are constrained by statutory language in criminal cases. Similarly, Republican appointees are constrained by statutes in civil rights cases. Yet, neither Democrats nor Republicans are constrained in economic cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States is undergoing dramatic demographic change, primarily from immigration, and many of the new Latino immigrants are settling in the South. This paper examines hypotheses related to attitudes of Latino immigrants toward black Americans in a Southern city. The analyses are based on a survey of black, white, and Latino residents (n = 500). The results show, for the most part, Latino immigrants hold negative stereotypical views of blacks and feel that they have more in common with whites than with blacks. Yet, whites do not reciprocate in their feelings toward Latinos. Latinos’ negative attitudes toward blacks, however, are modulated by a sense of linked fate with other Latinos. This research is important because the South still contains the largest population of African Americans in the United States, and no section of the country has been more rigidly defined along a black-white racial divide. How these new Latino immigrants situate themselves vis-à-vis black Americans has profound implications for the social and political fabric of the South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context matters, but which context? We live in more than one context; for example, the cities in which we reside may differ dramatically from the neighborhoods we call home. When testing the racial-threat hypothesis, previous research has focused upon a single context, usually in isolation from other, potentially competing contexts. This paper argues that racial context is complicated for whites, and that multiple contexts need to be considered to assess racial threats effectively. Using individual evaluations of neighborhood and city, I show that contexts interact in complicated, surprising, and important ways. I find that the presence of African Americans does have a negative effect upon white attitudes, but that the effect can be misleading if examined in isolation. Scholars need to carefully consider multiple contexts when examining attitudes, and individuals who inhabit incongruent—that is, conflicting— contexts tell an interesting story about race and residence in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the U.S. federal budget allocation to the states. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominence to Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on the impact of presidents during the period 1982–2000. Our findings suggest that federal budget allocation is affected by presidential politics. States that heavily supported the incumbent president in past presidential elections tend to receive more funds, while marginal and swing states are not rewarded. Party affiliation also matters since states whose governor belong to the same party of the president receive more federal funds, while states opposing the president's party in Congressional elections are penalized. These results show that presidents are engaged in tactical distribution of federal funds and also provide good evidence in support of partisan theories of budget allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of employment status on voting by formally modeling the effect of partisan government on workers’ economic interests. These interests are determined by model workers’ labor supply decisions, which are conditioned on their expected wage, unemployment benefits, and the probability of receiving a job offer or being laid off. Both probabilities are influenced by the party in power. The solution to the model implies that, relative to the employed, the higher the education level, the income, and the unemployment benefits of the unemployed the less likely they are to vote for the party associated with higher growth. The unemployment rate has the same impact. These hypotheses are successfully tested on NES 1972–2000 U.S. presidential elections data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of U.S. foreign aid have firmly established that foreign policy and domestic considerations strongly influence allocations of military and economic development assistance. Uncharted, however, is the question of similar influences on U.S. humanitarian aid. Analyzing U.S. foreign disaster assistance data from 1964 through 1995, this paper concludes that foreign policy and domestic factors not only influence disaster assistance allocations but that they are the overriding determinant. This impact is, however, somewhat differential: the initial“yes/no” decision to grant disaster assistance is markedly political, but the subsequent“how much” decision is also not devoid of political considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common critique of school choice is that it will have the practical effect of further increasing racial and ethnic segregation in American education. Although most survey evidence indicates that the highest priority of parents in choosing schools is academic quality, with the race and ethnic composition of the student body being much less important, many critics doubt that private preferences are being publicly revealed. In this paper, we use an experimental design embedded in a survey to obtain an alternative measure of educational quality and racial diversity as considerations for household school choice. While both academic quality and race/ethnic diversity had an effect on preferences, academic quality was a more important predictor. We then examined the relationship between preference and actual choice outcomes. Race-related opinions were nonpredictive of outcomes, but a stress on high test scores by parents predicted school choice among students who are not“at risk.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the determinants and consequences of Latino political representation in the field of K-12 education. The first task is to examine the association between Latino population and the Latino presence on school boards. We then investigate if Latino representation is affected by the electoral structure of school boards, as scholars have reached differing conclusions on whether at-large and ward systems hinder or enhance minority descriptive representation. The next step examines the consequences of Latino representation, specifically whether board membership is associated with the share of Latino school administrators and teachers. The regression results show that Latino population positively affects Latino board representation, but that at-large systems hinder descriptive representation. The primary determinant of Latino administrators is Latino school board membership, and the primary determinant of Latino teachers is Latino administrators. In sum, at-large elections negatively influence Latino educational representation, which produces a ripple effect that ultimately reduces the share of Latino teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the growing empirical literature on filibusters by examining the factors that are associated with individual-level filibustering behavior. We focus particularly on the behavior of senators in the latter part of their careers, using impending retirement as analytical leverage to determine whether decisions to engage or not in dilatory parliamentary practices are driven more by narrowly drawn considerations of instrumental utility or by compliance with institutional norms of deference and cooperation. Using data from 1975 to 1993 and employing multivariate models that allow us to control for other relevant factors, we find only limited support for a narrowly rational model of Senate “followership.” In the course of our enquiry, we clarify the notion of legislative norms, integrate our study with recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the evolution of cooperative behavior and consider how leadership can be exercised in environments largely bereft of formal leadership resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a series of questions related to the survival of disagreement among interdependent citizens during an election campaign. Do campaign-stimulated processes of collective deliberation result in the elimination of disagreement within networks of social communication? If not, what are the factors that sustain political heterogeneity and disagreement? And what are the consequences of political heterogeneity within these communication networks for patterns of political influence between and among citizens? Finally, in what manner is the influence of one citizen on another conditioned by the structure of communication networks and the distribution of preferences in the remainder of these networks? We address these questions based on a study of electoral dynamics in the 1996 presidential campaign as it took place in the Indianapolis and St. Louis metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines agency mortality between 1946 and 1997 and argues that, contrary to popular belief, agencies are not immortal. Rather, agencies face significant risks of termination, particularly due to political turnover. When an agency's opponents gain power, the hazards of agency mortality increase. Principal among the findings of this paper are that 62% of agencies created since 1946 have been terminated and that political turnover is one of the primary causes of termination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a very important question for media researchers, political campaigners, and democratic theorists alike: Does negative campaigning demobilize the electorate? Using both aggregate-and individual-level turnout data and evidence on the nature or "tone" of virtually every U.S. Senate campaign between 1988 and 1998, we find that campaign negativism has a curvilinear effect on turnout, with most observed levels of negativism actually stimulating turnout. Only at extremely high levels does negativism in political campaigns generally suppress turnout. We find no consistent evidence that person-based criticisms of the opponent have any different effect than policy-based criticisms. However, we do find support for the hypothesis that partisans tend to be stimulated by campaign negativism while independents are more likely to be discouraged by such campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]