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Social information, defined as information about what others have done, are doing or will be doing in future, is a powerful motivator of pro-social behaviour. However there is little research on the role of social information on volunteering, where work has instead examined socio-economic and demographic correlates, the role of personal networks and barriers to participation. In this paper we examine the effect of leader and peer endorsement as forms of social information where such endorsement provides a signal to others that these people value the activity and sets an example that others could emulate. The paper presents the results of a field experiment carried out in the autumn of 2013, which examined the effect of different forms of endorsement on volunteering activity amongst 100,000 students in five UK universities. We compare the effect on volunteering rates of politician, celebrity and peer endorsement from named people who have engaged in volunteering compared with a control group that has no such endorsement. We examine outcome measurements of click-throughs to volunteering unit websites, attendance at volunteering training, registration with volunteering units, and results from an all-student survey seven weeks after the original e-mails. We find student endorsements reduce click-throughs. There are treatment effects for endorsement by politicians on subsequent training. We find heterogeneity in treatment effects for registration and training, with both negative and positive effects of celebrity endorsements. Overall, we find some support for the provision of leader and celebrity endorsement, but confirm negative effects for peer endorsement in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960’s, the majority of researchers studying political behavior in the United States seem content to either ignore the sociological basis of citizen choice or treat social location as a secondary, less important determinant of political choice. The bulk of the work that has been done concerning the sociological basis of citizen choice focuses on the role that membership in demographic group categories plays in shaping political choices. The findings from these sorts of studies has not only reinforced the perception that social location is a secondary, less important determinant of political choice, but also led some to conclude that modern citizens have become largely independent of groups and social influence (Dalton and Wattenberg, 1993:212-3). Although few would agree that this asocial model of political choice accurately represents reality for most Americans, it is nevertheless striking how little in the way of empirical evidence has been compiled to challenge it. The purpose of this paper is to make use of three unique surveys conducted during the 1984, 1992, and 1996 presidential campaigns to take a closer look at the sociological basis of modern citizen choice, specifically the role of social networks on political choice. By shifting the focus away from the sorts of social groups typically studied in political science (i.e., demographic groups) toward social networks, I seek to determine whether modern choice is still strongly linked to social interaction. It is important to note, however, that simply discovering a link between social networks and political choice would not, in and of itself, present a strong challenge to the asocial model of citizen choice. To do so, it is necessary to demonstrate that social influence occurs beyond the boundaries of close relationships (e.g., family, close friends) and takes place in a significant way among less intimate contacts like nonrelatives and casual acquaintances. The paper is divided into two main sections. In the first, I seek to determine what sort of role social networks play in shaping modern candidate choice. Do networks exert a significant and direct impact on candidate choice, even after controlling for key variables like partisanship and issue position? In the second, I look to see whether social influence regarding partisanship and issue preferences is restricted to intimate friends and acquaintances. Does the most important social influence occur within intimate friendships, or do more casual acquaintances exert a significant impact on choice as well? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should normative political theorists think about contentious and potentially coercive political action? What should the limits of acceptable political activity be? How are the boundaries of reasonable participation in the political life of a liberal democratic nation to be delineated? These questions are central to the actual functioning of any liberal democratic society. They remain, however, largely unanswered by contemporary normative political theory. Indeed since the early 1970s, remarkably few political theorists have seriously addressed the challenges of protest, direct action and civil disobedience, even as these topics have become central to the study of empirical politics. This paper examines some of the reasons for that oversight and seeks to point out its consequences for the study of political theory in the early twenty first century. In particular, the paper contends that much contemporary liberal political theory is undermined by serious misunderstandings as to the nature of political life and these misunderstandings prevent a proper analysis of the more contentious elements of political participation in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars study the properties of voting rules, but few extend their studies to legislative institutions such as quorum requirements. This paper investigates the optimal quorum requirement between 1 and N, assuming that decisions are made by simple majority rule. Quorum requirements are evaluated by the probability that they fulfill one of four criteria: 1) the Pareto criterion, 2) a modified version of Rae?s criterion, 3) Expected Social Gain (a utilitarian criterion), and 4) a Non-Negative Representation criterion (a measure of how well the quorum represents the assembly). This paper shows that the optimal quorum according to all four criteria is typically no quorum requirement. However, the optimal quorum according to the third and fourth criterion is N, if non-voters are more likely to oppose the proposal than favor it. Such results have important implications for institutional design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A positive party image is the chief collective good parties provide to their members. Parties foster a positive image through coordinating their activities in the legislative process and through their communication with voters. While political scientists have generally emphasized the former activity and dismissed partisan communication as ?cheap talk?, we argue that a party?s ability to coordinate its communication has important implications for the study of American politics. Unfortunately for the parties, most of their communication with voters occurs through a channel outside their control: The news media. This paper presents a basic model of the newsmaking process, and argues that the rules and incentives of the mass media can significantly alter the partisan tone and composition of news about the parties. These changes are not the result of partisan "bias," but rather the consequence of journalists following simple and widely accepted notions of what makes a "good" story. The main implication of the model is that it is extremely difficult for the presidential party in Congress to present a "unified front" with the president in the news. The non-presidential party, on the other hand, is relatively likely to have an opportunity to express their ideal positions, even during unified government. We also develop a model for the likely persuasive effects of different types of messages, arguing that messages by fellow partisans or which damage a party’s standing should be especially credible with voters. The paper then puts the model?s predictions to the test by examining actual patterns of partisan statements on the evening news. The main data source for this analysis, compiled by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, is a content analysis tracking the source, target and valence of several thousand partisan evaluations during the years 1981, 1992-1995, and 2001. Using a variety of statistical tests, we confirm that the presidential party is disproportionately likely to criticize him in the news, and that such criticism is exceptionally damaging to the president’s standing with the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast growing statistical literatures on matching methods in several disciplines offer the promise of causal inference without resort to the difficult-to-justify functional form assumptions inherent in commonly used parametric methods. However, these literatures also suffer from many diverse and conflicting approaches to estimation, uncertainty, theoretical analysis, and practical advice. In this paper, we propose a unified perspective on matching as a method of nonparametric preprocessing for improving parametric methods. This approach makes it possible for researchers to preprocess their data (such as with the easy-to-use software we offer with this paper) and then to apply whatever familiar statistical techniques they would have used anyway. Under our approach, instead of using matching to replace existing methods, we use it to make existing methods work better, such as by giving more accurate and considerably less model-dependent causal inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A relatively nascent phenomenon, weblogs commonly known as blogs, hold tremendous potential to change American politics. To date, little has been written on this topic apart from some preliminary research that investigated the relationship between this new form of media communication and older more traditional forms of media. This paper assesses whether or not writing a weblog is a form of political participation and whether or not weblogs are a viable vehicle through which to augment political participation. Selecting for the most popular political weblogs, we study bloggers and their opinions about writing weblogs as it relates to politics, political discourse and political participation. Data for this paper was generated through an e-mail survey that was sent to bloggers in June 2004. Initial findings from this research suggest that blogs can potentially play an important role in improving political participation giving individuals an additional voice in the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how public opinion on political issues can become enmeshed with citizens? ideas about gender and race?their race and gender schemas?even when the issues have nothing on their face to do with gender or race. The paper begins by reviewing a theory of ?group implication,? which specifies when political rhetoric will mobilize people?s race or gender schemas to influence their opinion on a political issue. The most important conditions are that the schema be psychologically accessible and that the rhetoric structure the issue in a way that matches the structure of the schema. When this occurs, people?s feelings about race or gender will affect their evaluation of the issue despite the lack of racial or gender content in the issue. In the heart of the paper, I present experimental results designed to test the implications of the theory. These results demonstrate that appropriately-constructed political rhetoric can lead people to engage their race or gender predispositions in evaluating a range of social welfare policies. While both racial and gender implication occur under the conditions specified by my theory, there are interesting differences between race and gender implication. I conclude by linking these patterns with the different ways that race and gender have been linked with partisan political competition in recent American history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how presidentialism influences legislative party system formation by focusing on the Philippines. The country?s post-transition party system serves as a ?crucial case? in the sense that its institutional configuration, according to an acknowledged theory, is a most likely case of national legislative bipartism, yet the actual party system did not follow the prediction. In this concern the paper examines why the theory does not properly explain the multipartism in post-Marcos Philippines. My analyses of the Philippines illustrate that the theory failed to give due attention to three issues: (1) number of presidential candidates need to be taken as a variable, (2) presidential elections influence the organization of legislative parties by providing preferred party affiliation options for legislative aspirants, and (3) presidential elections affect the cross-district variation rather than the number of parties competing at district-level. A comparative implication of this single-country study is that the influence of presidential election on legislative party system formation may be found at the level of cross-district variation rather than at the level of the number of parties in each district. This conjecture can be tested by cross-national studies in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper?s focus is religious volunteerism as an element of social capital and driver of political participation among women and addresses the competing assessments made of it by the social capital and feminist literatures. Women?s greater rates of participation in religious organizations are well documented. Also well understood is their stronger religiosity which is tied to their traditional roles as guardians of morality (particularly for children) and which exerts an influence on their political opinions. This paper adds to our knowledge of this dimension of women?s lives by evaluating the role that religious volunteerism plays, particularly as it relates to the private and public benefits and bridging and bonding concepts within the social capital literature, when compared to other forms of volunteerism. Using the 2000 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating, the paper argues that significant benefits derive from women?s religious volunteering but that this occurs within a setting that emphasizes women?s traditional gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why Do Rich People Make Political Contributions? Some Surprising Results from a Formal Model Henry E. Brady Department of Political Science Goldman School of Public Policy University of California August 25, 2004 Abstract: Researchers have repeatedly observed a strong positive correlation between political contributions and income. An obvious inference from this correlation is that growing income inequality should reduce political contributions from those in the lower classes because their income will fall with increased inequality. Similarly, growing income inequality should increase contributions from those in the upper classes because their income will increase with increased inequality. But changes in income and economic inequality are not the same thing. Income is an individual characteristic stemming from personal capabilities, opportunities, decisions, and luck. Income inequality is a property of society, a social fact about the distribution of incomes. The formal model described in this paper demonstrates that income and income inequality operate in different ways. The model considers N income classes whose gross income is generated by some process outside the model. In the model, government taxes away a portion of this income through an exogenously determined proportional tax on all income above an income ?disregard.? Income classes then compete for a share of the resulting tax revenue by making political contributions. The model predicts that when higher income classes are numerically smaller than lower classes so that the income distribution is skewed to the right as we typically find empirically, then political contributions increase with income, but when income is skewed to the left, political contributions decrease with income. Thus, political contributions typically increase with income because there are so few rich people compared to poor ones. When income distributions are right-skewed enough, per-capita contributions increase progressively with income. The model also demonstrates that two kinds of changes in income distributions are possible. One kind of change occurs when income levels remain the same but people move from one level to another. When inequality increases in this way, the lower classes provide more political contributions and upper classes provide fewer. Another kind of change occurs when the incomes attached to classes change. When income increases proportionately for all classes then political contributions increase, but only because mean income has increased. In this situation, relative inequality remains the same. When the ratio of the lowest income to the income step between classes increases, then political contributions increase because mean income increases as well. Relative inequality also decreases because the standard deviation of incomes compared to their overall mean decreases. Thus the paper develops a model that is consistent with the stylized facts about political contributions and income, that provides a reason why the rich contribute more, that makes new predictions about the impact of income inequality, and that provides substantial guidance on how empirical work should proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely held argument that civic engagement and political participation reinforce each other, which remains to be empirically vindicated, especially in the context of developing societies. Using survey data from Kathmandu, this paper examines the structural relationships between civic engagement, electoral participation, and other forms of political participation and finds that civic engagement contributes to other forms of political participation, which in turn affects electoral participation. In process, this paper identifies the extent of civic engagement, electoral participation, and other forms of political participation and their characteristics, with important policy implications on maximizing electoral participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper charts the evolution over the last half-century of how the Republican party has increasingly used the economy in its campaign appeals. Two dimensions are examined: agenda-setting (how prominent the economy is relative to other concerns) and framing (whether positions on specific issues are rhetorically linked to the economy). Despite embracing similar positions, the initial part of the paper shows, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan defended them in different ways, with Reagan elevating economic matters in his agenda-setting and framing. An analysis of the party?s platforms from 1948-2000 shows that the rhetorical differences between Goldwater and Reagan were representative of the party?s approach in their respective eras. The analysis then turns to Republican governors? state-of-the-state speeches, with the sample chosen to include similarly matched years of both strong and weak economic performance. During the period under study the governors greatly increased the use of the economy in their agenda-setting and framing, a finding that applies to both the strong and the weak years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its major breakthrough in the late 1980s, the Western European Far Right’s unifying feature has been its hostility toward immigrants from the Third World, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and a program advancing the interests of the ‘native’ ethnic majority. Though its new importance as an electoral movement is generally accepted, there exists a tension in explanations of the Far Right’s electoral fortunes. Major comparative studies, writing from a perspective grounded in modernization (and now post-modernization) theory, tie Far Right success to a transition to post-industrial society, coupled with the inability of existing parties to cope with a shift in the electorate’s preferences privileging post-industrial issues. In contrast, ethnic mobilization is a well-known feature of politics in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America and now Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Ethnic competition in these regions is primarily theorized as some combination of economic and cultural competition between ethnic groups in close proximity. This paper seeks to bridge that divide by reconceptualizing the Far Right as the response by an ethnic majority to the ‘threat’ posed by an incoming ethnic minority, a ‘majoritarian mobilization’. Rather than see the recent success of the Far Right as the success of a coalition of voters threatened by the transition to post-industrial economies, this paper portrays the Far Right’s success as the response to a perceived ‘invasion’ by non-Western immigrants in the late 1980s. To consider the evidence for a majoritarian mobilization, this paper surveys support at the national level for the Far Right in 15 Western European cases between 1980 and 1999, using a combination of stylized facts and systematic data on electoral returns, immigration, unemployment and crime. In explaining divergence in Far Right success at the national level since 1980, this study privileges the level of immigration, electoral rules and the character of a state’s political culture. A majoritarian mobilization cannot occur without the credible threat of permanent, significant economic and cultural competition between ethnic groups. In Western Europe, states with significant immigration in the late 1980s and early 1990s were faced for the first time in 70 years with the possibility of permanent and significant ethnic minorities. Once the pre-conditions of a majoritarian mobilization are met and ethnicity has become salient in the electorate, electoral rules and political culture determine approximately how successful majoritarian ethnic parties are in mobilizing national vote support. Whether a state has electoral rules permissive or restrictive toward party entry at the majoritarian ethnic party’s point of takeoff determines its ability to succeed beyond the local level. Second, whether a state’s political culture is predisposed to dampen or aggravate ethnic tensions determines whether ethnicity remains durable as a political issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African-American churches are cornerstones of black political mobilization. They employ their resources as religious institutions to inform group political consciousness, influence political choices, and shape political behavior through the development of democratic skills and the transfer of political messages (Calhoun-Brown 1996; Harris 1999; McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Verba, Schlozman, Brady, and Nie 1993). Historically, they have encouraged blacks to participate politically through protest and electoral action. They can move blacks to the streets as demonstrators and protestors, as well as lead them to the polls as voters and candidates. African-American churches demonstrated this well during the civil rights movement and in the subsequent period from protest to politics (McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Harris 1999; Tate 1993). In the contemporary period, however, African-American churches participate politically through means beyond protest and elections. Across the United States, hundreds of African-American churches cooperate with public agencies to run social welfare programs rather than just rely on contention and electoral mobilization to change social welfare policies and those who make them. In cooperating with government, they often use nonprofit subsidiaries, rather than their congregations. A common nonprofit type they employ is the community development corporation (CDC). The CDC originated during the War on Poverty as a tax-exempt organization aided by government resources to improve the environments and economies of disadvantaged neighborhoods (Perry 1987). The earliest African-American church-associated CDCs appeared in the early 1960s. By the mid-1990s, at least 156 African-American church-associated CDCs exist in the United States (Frederick 2001). Some serve as nonprofit subsidiaries of individual congregations, while others function as ecumenical institutions among a set of congregations or clerical alliances (Owens 2003). This paper focuses on the political factors that account for the selection of cooperation as political mobilization by African-American churches. It raises a question: Why do African-American churches charter CDCs to cooperate with government instead of increasing their protest or electoral action to challenge the conditions of the poor? It answers it with data from New York City. The paper concludes that African-American churches cooperate with government because a black political ethos and black public opinions about political participation guides them, the material incentives of public policies entice them, and the substantive needs of their neighborhoods compels them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since spring 2001, Professors Sharon Barrios and Lori Weber and student editors have produced three annual volumes of Studium: The Student Journal of Politics in the Department of Political Science at California State University, Chico. The main goal of the Studium project is to offer students a unique educational opportunity. Studium gives student authors a chance to publish quality papers and to reference their publication on resumes and graduate or law school applications. It also gives other students an opportunity to read their peers’ high-quality work. In addition, it gives the student editors the chance to read, critique, and edit a wide array of papers on politics. In the process the students learn production skills, including desk-top publishing; diplomacy skills as they work closely with student authors; grant writing skills as they strive to find journal funding; and promotional skills in order to solicit papers, contact university libraries for journal placement, organize an annual journal conference, and to begin to develop a nationwide student journal association. Finally, Studium supplies instructors with a convenient teaching tool with its examples of high quality student papers. This paper provides an account of our experience with the organizing, production, and maintenance of this unique educational opportunity for both students and professors. Student journals are fairly common in English departments in universities around the United States. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the only student journal located in a U.S. Political Science department. Consequently, this paper will mark the beginning of an effort to assist in expanding this practice to other universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last fifty years, mass partisanship has become more responsible. Using newly collected data, this paper shows that partisanship is now based substantially more on a rational assessment of differences between the parties, than on non-cognitive bases. In previously published research (2002, with Pomper), I showed that after 1972 there was an increasing trend toward a greater cognitive basis of partisanship (based on perception of party differences) and a diminishing trend away from the affective basis (based on parental partisanship). That analysis ended in 1992 because the National Election Study then stopped asking the parental partisanship questions. This paper provides original data from a 2002 nationwide survey that replicated the NES parental partisanship questions, together with the relevant questions about respondent partisanship and the perception of differences between the parties. That data set, supplemented with the earlier NES data, permits a five-decade comparison of the bases of party identification, which confirms and strengthens the evidence of increasing mass partisan responsibility. These findings validate party-based voting, providing contemporary evidence that such behavior is rational because it is based on perceived differences between the parties (and, as such, policy considerations) rather than merely on inherited, affective considerations. This evidence has important implications for responsible party analysis by suggesting a different kind of mass partisanship, one that is both ‘rational" and "responsible." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a long period of post-war neglect by most mainstream scholars, religion assumed a new prominence in political science during the late 1970s. Despite the latter-day significance accorded religion by the discipline, the product of several unexpected real-world events, much of the recent research has focused on specific episodes or groups without drawing on or developing general theories. This paper suggests that Social Movement Theory (SMT), particularly in its most recent incarnation, offers a way to address the three critical questions about religiously engaged political movements: What are the motives for political activity by religious groups? What means do they possess that facilitate political action? What features and conditions of the political system provide them opportunity to undertake effective political action? The bulk of the paper explores various expressions of religiously based political action from the vantage point of SMT. We conclude that the translation of religious grievances into political action is contingent on a string of conditions involving the interplay of motive, means and opportunity. The implicit message is that scholars should approach religiously engaged social movements with the same theoretical frameworks used to understand secular political forces and that focusing these interpretive lenses on religion will illuminate issues of general interest to the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper revisits some old propositions of pluralist theories and the Columbia school about the impact of ‘cross-pressure’ on political attitudes and behavior that, following some discouraging test results, largely vanished from scholarly works since the early seventies. Cross-pressure means that some individuals, like socially conservative trade union members in the United States, are pulled in opposite partisan directions because of their different characteristics. In their most generalized form the relevant hypothesis suggests that the more conflicting are the ways the various attributes of citizens pull them towards one party or another, the more disengaged they become, reducing cognitive and affective involvement with politics as well as participation. The paper scrutinizes the micro-logic of the proposition, points out that cross-pressure on citizens may be one of the mechanisms underlying the freezing effect of cleavages postulated by Lipset and Rokkan (1967), develops a greatly improved measure of cross-pressure, and subjects the hypothesis to a far more comprehensive test than those attempted before. The empirical analysis finds some support for the hypothesis using worldwide cross-sectional data on various forms of political participation from the World Values Study. However, not all forms of participation are affected to the same extent, and there are also signs of some significant cross-national variations. The cross-national differences can, however, be linked to survey sample and political system characteristics in ways that are consistent with the original hypothesis. Interestingly, it is the conflicting electoral influence of different value orientations that seems to be the truly consequential source of cross-pressure, and not the conflicting influence of two or more socio-demographic characteristics on party preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In numerous countries over the past two decades, the independence of electoral management bodies (EMBs) has emerged a crucial and contentious issues of democratization. Often inter-party conflicts have revolved around the formal rules that govern the appointment of top national election officials. Breaking the almost complete silence comparative politics has kept on issues of electoral governance, the present paper develops an indicator of EMB independence applicable in cross-national large-N research. In its first section, it explicates the ‘thinness’, but defends the validity, of EMB appointment procedures as indicators of EMB independence. In its second section, it develops its operational proposal. To read appointment rules as measures of EMB independence from governmental control, it argues, we have to take into account prevailing structures of political alignment. We have to complement our knowledge of legal rules with information about election results and party-systemic structures. The result is a dichotomous measure of institutional independence that nevertheless recognizes various modes of independence: the control of EMB composition by judicial actors, civic associations, or opposition parties. It also includes the possibility of power sharing and power dispersion arrangements. In its third and final section, the paper applies the coding procedure to Latin American election commissions since 1980. The resulting picture is one of stable and diverse independence of electoral governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship of party finance and party system development by examining a case study of Romania as well as a cross-national study of the Baltics. This paper examines the logic behind party and campaign financing and its implementation in Romania and the Baltics from 1992-2003. The first section of the paper explores the rationale behind party campaign finance, notes some of the criticisms of state campaign subsidies and addresses how party campaign finance generally influences the party system. The second section examines the case study of the Romanian finance system and addresses how this system has influenced the development of Romanian parties and the party system. The final section examines the various Baltic campaign finance systems and provides a comparative analysis of the impact of party finance on the consolidation of party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a simple theory to understand the relative incentives chief executives face to appoint partisans or non-partisans to cabinet ministries. In systems where the chief executive depends on a legislative majority for policy success, the chief executive must appoint partisans to the cabinet. In systems where the chief executive possesses independent powers and thus depends relatively less on a legislative majority for policy success, the chief executive has a wider range of cabinet appointment options available. We explore cabinet dynamics across all regime types: parliamentary monarchies and republics, semi-presidential systems, and presidential regimes. Our dependent variable is the share of non-partisans in the cabinet, and the key independent variable is the system of government (later iterations of this paper will add cabinet coalescence as a dependent variable). The four types of political regimes can be arrayed along a continuum from weakest to strongest head of state - from ceremonial monarchs to powerful presidents. As the head of state becomes stronger, he or she will possess greater autonomous powers - to appoint and dismiss ministers and bureaucrats, and to decree laws or other regulations - to make policy unilaterally. The more extensive are such powers, the lower partisanship in the cabinet. Our empirical analysis of 437 cabinets in 57 countries strongly confirms this argument. Our findings reveal that institutional format substantially differentiates the degree of partisanship in governments around the world. We then discuss how these differences are critical for understanding executive-legislative relations under different constitutional structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effects of racial diversity on political participation in American cities. In contrast to some recent research on the subject, the paper argues that incentives for participation are greatly reduced by homogeneity. It is argued that heterogeneous places are characterized by more conflict over resources and more mobilized groups, leading to higher levels of political participation. In order to test this argument I use data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey - a survey of more than 29,000 individuals across the United States. Respondents to the survey were matched with census data on their place of residence, creating a unique dataset which is analyzed using multilevel modeling techniques. The results of this analysis indicate that racial diversity is overall negatively correlated with voting; that is, the more diverse a place one lives in, the less likely it is that one will vote. However, if one allows the individual effect of race to vary randomly across cities, racial fractionalization becomes a strong predictor of increased vote among blacks. That is, black people who live in racially more diverse cities are more likely to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular participation in the electoral process plays a very important role in enhancing the legitimacy of democratic regimes. However, democracies differ widely in the degree to which voters exercise their franchise. This paper examines the effect of political institutions on electoral turnout in the new democracies of East Central Europe (Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia). The paper considers a number of hypotheses. First, electoral turnout should increase with the proportionality of the electoral system (Blais and Carty 1990, Cox 1999). Second, electoral turnout should be greater where concurrent elections are held to multiple political offices, such as a strong presidency or a second chamber. Conversely, nonconcurring elections should reduce voter turnout. Finally, the party system may also have an impact both on electoral turnout as well as the magnitude of the effect of political institutions: the more competitive the party system, the higher the turnout and the stronger the impact of the political institutions are expected to be. The selection of the four cases from a well defined geo-political region allows to control the comparison for a number of sociological and historical variables. At the same time, the institutional diversity among the four new democracies provides for an excellent laboratory to test the above hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue in this paper that the historical development of Catholic theology, organizational structure, politics and community made Catholic confessional culture particularly important to the enactment of integration proposals in the post-World War II period. Specifically, the Catholic emphasis on the visible unity of the church, the centralization of the church around the authority of the pope, the success of predominantly Catholic political parties with federalist goals, and a sense of community among prominent politicians stemming from their common Catholic cultures proved necessary in the 1950s to moving the integration agenda forward. The weight of this paper is on the historical development of a Catholic confessional culture supportive of integration, with the details of the Community founding left to a future paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a new language for analyzing the functioning of political markets that integrates approaches previously isolated to such diverse research traditions as public choice, social cognition and institutional theory, as well as to political participation and lobbying in political science. In this view, political actors devise strategies based in manipulation of facts, frames, and fields, and seek to steer benefits through constructions such as political channels. In essence, political competition is analyzed from the perspective of its social constructions. The paper begins with a review of political markets and their imperfections, discusses the social construction of competition, introducing the importance of manipulable features such as frames, identifies major classes of benefits sought in political markets, develops a series of propositions concerning the operation and manipulation of frames and other factors in political markets, and concludes with the development of the important concept of political channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are in a phase of transition in advanced industrial democracy. A declining, socially restricted membership, decreasing levels of activism, and a shift towards more individualistic modes of political engagement threaten the secular role the party have played in modern democracy. The development of the Internet in a period of organisational change for parties has meant that it quickly became intertwined with debates about reviving representative political organisations. New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), including the Internet, in fact provide novel and important opportunities and challenges to political parties. Existing research has focused on the use of ICTs as tranformational of electoral campaigns, on the structure and functions of national and federal party sites, and on the impact of ICTs on the internal structure and decision-making of the parties. Much less attention has been devoted to intra-party dynamics, the rank-and-file, and how the introduction of ICTs has altered the relation between party activists, on the one hand, and party elites, ordinary members and the wider public on the other. Yet party activists constitute the life and blood of party organisation, both in (increasingly frequent) times of elections, and between elections. A change in the way party activists communicate and organise politically, primed by the use of ICTs, might help or hinder the re-structuration of parties in turbulent times. Using data from an online survey of party activists in the UK (N = 4770), this paper asks questions about the perception and use of ICTs by party activist, ICTs potential for participation and engagement of rank-and-file, the penetration of the Internet in pre-exiting political careers and patterns of organisational behaviour. Generally, and most importantly, the paper asks which role ICTs are playing in the re-structuration of political parties, seen from the privileged perspective of the insiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do opposition parties propose votes of no-confidence they know will not pass? Although there is an extensive literature on the confidence relationship between parliament and the executive, it tends to focus solely on the vote of no-confidence as a mechanism for the parliamentary majority control of the executive. This paper fills a gap in the literature by exploring the vote of no-confidence as a tool of the opposition, focusing on its use in the Japanese Diet. We suggest two possible reasons for the vote of no-confidence to have utility to the opposition, even when they know it will not pass. The opposition might use the no-confidence vote for legislative gains, using the no-confidence vote as a delay tactic or filibuster. Or the opposition might use it for electoral gains, using the no-confidence vote as an opportunity to publicize unpopular government policies or actions. Although the traditional literature on the Japanese Diet has suggested that the opposition uses the no-confidence vote for legislative gains, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that electoral gains hypothesis better explains no-confidence votes in postwar Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ways in which supply and demand side forces influence interest mobilization and formal inclusion in the policy making process in the European Union. Drawing on an original dataset of nearly 700 civil society groups active in the EU, the paper first considers the supply-side pressures on group mobilization resulting in today’s EU interest environment; this investigation offers further insight into 1) the effect of interest group resources on mobilization and participation, and 2) the differential representation of the EU member states and candidate countries. Second, the paper turns to consider demand-side forces. This section provides new analysis of 1) the effect of the major EU treaties on the interest group community, 2) the policy areas that are the subject of the most activity by organized interests and 3) the composition of the Commission’s consultative committee system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Nash, the subject of Nasar’s (1999) A Beautiful Mind, affected political science in important ways. His equilibrium concept and variants of it are the inferential foundation for many of game theory’s contributions to the study of politics. But do political actors have beautiful minds? We ask this question to focus attention on whether people, such as voters, think about politics in ways that popular equilibrium concepts imply. We argue that many people do not reason in these ways. Our paper examines the cognitive underpinnings of commonly used equilibrium concepts. In the process, we offer Fudenberg and Levine’s (1993) self-confirming equilibrium concept as more appropriate for an important class of political actors. We close the paper with a model of electoral competition that leverages this equilibrium concept’s substantive possibilities. We conclude that political science can increase the range and depth of its contributions by expanding its repertoire of solution concept [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies, tracks, and examines the 601 contested election cases in the House of Representatives from the 1st through 107th (1789-2002) Congresses. A chief goal of the paper is to assess the degree to which partisanship has been a significant factor in influencing contested election outcomes. The chief finding is that a sizeable majority of successful contests have favored the majority party; however, the overall impact of the contested election process, in terms of adding majority party seats, has been quite small on a per-Congress basis. The one exception to this latter finding was during the late-nineteenth century, when a significant increase in successful contests, and majority party additions, occurred. This was due, in large part, to the Republican Party’s strategic use of contested elections as a means of maintaining a presence in the former-Confederate South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates exactly what is meant by a sympathy vote in the context of the 2002 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota and proposes a specific model to explain the concept and what happened to dissipate the advantage enjoyed by Wellstone’s successor, Walter Mondale. Immediate speculation blamed Mondale’s decline in the polls on the ‘partisan’ Wellstone memorial which took place on the Tuesday night after Wellstone’s death and the night before Mondale’s nomination by the Democratic Party. While the memorial serves as part of the explanation, this paper presents a more comprehensive explanation for the changes in public opinion seen over the course of this final week-long campaign by integrating concepts and findings from the psychology, mass communication, and public opinion literatures. This more elaborate model not only accounts for the mechanism producing support for Mondale in polls, but also explains what happened to deflate such support and place the two candidates on a level playing field. Further, this model incorporates the emotional context of voter opinion in these circumstances and suggests boundaries for strategic decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governing parties of the Italian ‘First Republic’ all participated in the corrupt and clientelistic exploitation of state resources for electoral and organizational advantage, and their disintegration in the 1990s was in large part a consequence of the exhaustion of those resources. However, the rearrangement of the centre-right under Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership can be interpreted in similar terms. Although unlike its predecessors in a number of respects, Forza Italia’s organizational strategy until now has been similarly heavily reliant on the capture, or prospective capture, of state power. This paper will argue that the way in which Italian parties (particularly those of the centre-right) have organized and financed their activities has been conditioned by their inability or reluctance to construct mass party organizations based on ideologically motivated party membership. The absence of such voluntary activism presents parties with a set of dilemmas, which can be resolved in a number of ways. The common feature of parties which lack voluntary activists is their need to channel state resources, or at least the promise of state resources, into the party organization. The paper outlines a simple rational choice model of party organization, drawing on Mancur Olson’s well-known theory of collective action, which suggests how party organizers can overcome a shortage of voluntary activism, and illustrates the implications of these organizational dynamics for party behaviour. It then analyzes the organization and behaviour of three Italian parties, the Christian Democrats (DC), Socialists (PSI) and Forza Italia (FI), through the prism of this model. I will suggest that although their organizational structures are formally quite different, these parties have developed predictable organizational responses to the same problem of extensive ‘free-riding’ amongst their core constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the evolution of transnational human rights advocacy in the 1990s. Drawing on empirical data from research in Bangladesh, Mexico and the United States, the paper focuses on the emergence of economic and labor rights claims as central human rights concerns in a series of high-profile transnational advocacy campaigns. I highlight several types of strategic moves made by developing country-based activists who sought to position labor and economic rights claims as central human rights claims in the various cases. These unconventional moves, I argue, pushed a broader process of normative evolution that transcended the campaigns themselves - and enriches our understanding of the dynamics of transnational advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the findings from a study of students’ ‘lived experiences’ in the political science course ‘Democracy and Education’ and practicum ‘Coaching Public Achievement.’ The study uses qualitative methods to better analyze the complexities of students’ experiences and the learning that occurs through experience. This paper has two distinct goals. The first goal is to describe course and practicum as well as a potential model for instructors who wish to incorporate similar pedagogies and practical experiences into their courses. The second goal is to understand the nature of students’ experiences, what these experiences mean, how they learn through experience, and whether this course fosters political engagement. Based on narratives from in-depth interviews and student journals, this interpretive study aims at what Geertz (1971) calls thick description. While not a causal analysis, the study seeks to document learning and personal change through the critical analysis of detailed narratives. I highlight how students indeed have profound learning experiences in the course and practicum. The experience ‘de-centers’ students, provoking reflexive thought about their role in the program, young people and the nature of political action. Many describe how they have learned important inter-personal and political skills which they ‘tried out’ in other domains of their lives. However, while some students offer stories of personal change, it is unclear at this point they are more politically engaged as a result of the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of noncitizen voting in the United States. It is not widely known that noncitizens currently vote in local elections in Chicago, New York City and in five municipalities in Maryland; or that over the past decade campaigns to expand the franchise to noncitizens have been launched in at least a dozen other jurisdictions from coast to coast. These practices have their roots in another little known fact: for most of the country’s history–from the founding until the 1920s–noncitizens voted in at least twenty two states and federal territories and held public office such as alderman, coroner, and school board member. This paper presents arguments for (and against) noncitizen voting rights, and examines some of the contemporary political organizations and actors who fought for and won (or lost) campaigns to reinstate noncitizen voting. The paper explores recent campaigns that successfully reestablished noncitizen voting, that are currently underway, and other campaigns that failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that churches may play important roles in promoting civic participation among their members. But churches and similar local worship communities differ markedly in the degree to which they do so. Drawing on a recently completed study of the role of churches, mosques, temples, and other worship communities in the social and civic incorporation of recent immigrants, this paper presents an approach to understanding what worship communities might do to promote civic participation and how they differ among themselves in doing so. The paper identifies three dimensions of support for civic participation: social capital, associations as civic actors, and associations as sites of training in civic skills and mobilization for civic action. The paper also develops a model for understanding how and why local worship communities serving immigrants vary along these dimensions, focusing on the circumstances of immigration, the type of ‘institutional culture’ of the worship community, and the religious tradition it draws upon. We present data from our survey of Washington, D.C. area churches, mosques, temples, and other worship communities to illustrate the sorts of differences that emerge along each one of our three dimensions and demonstrate the utility of the explanatory model developed here. The paper ends with reflections on how this approach might be applied to the question of the role of local worship communities more generally in promoting civic participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how institutional design features of legislatures and electoral factors regarding the make-up of government affect interest group activity. Using a new database of all lobbying expenditures in the U.S. states for times ranging up to 20 years, we conduct a number of statistical panel analyses using fixed effects. The paper argues that the core design of political institutions can have a large effect on aggregate interest group lobbying. This includes constitutional provisions regarding when legislatures meet and their budgeting process. On the contrary, shorter-term electoral factors, such as the parties and government in power, the closeness of election margins, and legislated rules regarding lobbying activity, seems to have little effect on special interest lobbying expenditures. Thus, as Madison noted early on, it is at the time of institutional design that constitutionalist must consider the influence of interest groups, because politicians, parties, governments, and rules have little statistical impact on special interest lobbying expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract With the gradual change of the left-right paradigm in Latin America, it is difficult to define what policies comprise the leftist position today. In 1990, during the time of the collapse of the communist bloc, the extreme poles of left-right ideologies converged to the center. Yet individuals continue to self-place themselves on the left. Who are these individuals? And is there still room for leftist leanings in Latin America? First, this paper provides a summary of what left-right policies once meant in three Latin America countries. Second it discusses what other scholars have said about left self-placement in Latin America. Next, it takes into account the gradual change the left has experienced, and what it might denote to be the ?New Left? of Latin America. This paper is a test of my hypotheses that concludes that in some countries class differences and certain views on issues are still significant factors to determine left-right ideologies. The conclusion of the paper examines how socio-economic conditions can affect how certain policies will be accepted or rejected. This paper concludes by discussing how identifying on the left does not necessarily signify that it offers alternative polices from the status quo. However, regardless of the convergence to the center, there perhaps may be room for some radical thought in contemporary Latin American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sees as problematic the general understanding in feminist literature that mothers? movements are un-feminist and generally ineffectual in their political dissent. This paper argues that the positivist dichotomies that frame women in general as being ?emotional?, ?unthinking? and ?weak? vis-?-vis ?rational?, ‘scientific? and ‘strong? men are being reproduced in feminist debates. Positivist dichotomies are reconstructed within the feminist movement where mothers as political actors in dissent are trivialized as ?traditional?, ?uncritical?, ?emotional? and ?ineffective? whereas womens? movements that do not define their participant identities in terms of ?motherhood? are valorized as ?modern?, ?rational? and ?effective? in exposing patriarchy and the links between violence, war and militarized masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Russians felt about political advertising in the 1999 Duma and 2000 presidential campaigns through a series of 24 focus groups conducted in Moscow, Ulyanovsk and a small town near Voronezh in the spring of 2000. While Russians can be dismissive about advertising as well as attempts to sway their political beliefs, comments in these focus groups show how Russians are influenced by words and images during election campaigns. In particular, Russians appear to seek and respond to images of order as opposed to being concerned with gaining a deeper understanding of a range of parties and candidates during elections. Thus, while Russians are able to recognize unfair election coverage and attempts at manipulation (particularly on the prime state channel ORT), they often are pragmatic rather than upset over these tactics. While this does not conform to Western ideas about the proper role of the media during elections, it does suggest that Russians often perceive television as more important in nation-building and creating a sense of order than in championing freedom of information and political choice. In the focus groups, the respondents often seemed resigned that democracy and free speech can lead to chaos and, as such, a slanted and skewed presentation of political choices is a price they must pay for some sort of order in their troubled country. This paper is part of a larger project by the author to study the role of television in the attempt to build democracy in Russia, a project which includes a study of election news content on state and commercial television in several elections, a review of political advertising and a public opinion survey in 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the research on turnout in European parliamentary elections has focused on explaining why turnout in these elections is low. Explanations for low turnout include the second order nature of EP elections, negative attitudes about European integration, negative news and lack of mobilization. In this paper, we examine the role of television news coverage in mobilizing voters during the 1999 EP election campaign. The effect of the tone of coverage depends on how visible the campaign is. When the campaign is most visible, negative news can demobilize voters, but campaign news is less visible, negative news has the potential to mobilize electorates. We also find that the mobilizing effects of campaign visibility news are conditioned by levels of attention to political news. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a twenty-year series of national surveys conducted ten times each year by the Roper Organization, we investigate the contribution of age, period, and cohort effects to the trends in political activity among black Americans. In this effort we take into account the importance of the different historical conditions of each generation’s political socialization. In a previous paper, we noted sizable differences in political participation rates by age and hypothesized that generational differences were partially responsible for the gaps. In this paper we develop an age-period cohort model for the Roper participation data to determine the relative importance of cohort and period effects on changes in the rate of political activity among black Americans. We also develop a method for estimating more precise measures of age from coarsened age categories using a variant of a multiple imputation for missing data technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data gathered in the 2001 British Election Study to investigate the determinants of turnout in general elections. The analyses focus on the explanatory power of a variant of a modified rational choice model which has stimulated protracted debate among students of voting behaviour. The paper also considers two versions of the much discussed ?heartlands hypothesis? which has been offered to explain the unprecedented drop in turnout in the 2001 general election. Analyses indicate that all three variables in the modified rational choice model have strong and statistically significant effects. Although sense of civic duty is predictably powerful, turnout also is affected by expected benefits and perceived costs of voting. Analyses do not support a ?Downsian? version of the heartlands hypothesis that blames low turnout on New Labour’s abandonment of traditional Labour policy and ideological positions. A ‘stokesian? version of the hypothesis that attributes effects to government performance dissatisfaction among Labour’s heartlands supports fares better. The paper concludes by considering the implications of major findings for future trends in electoral participation in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines different aspects of media contexts at the macro-level, as well as at the micro-level, which may stimulate electorates to turn out and vote. After introducing the different aspects of media contexts that may matter in explaining voter turnout, the relationship between these variables and electoral participation in the European elections of 1999 will be studied. Media variables will be tested in an integrated model (at the individual level), controlling for other variables that have often been found to affect electoral participation, by using a large-scale survey dataset that contains all EU-member states. The results indicate that both partisan media contexts and a situation of intensive election campaigning can mobilize the electorate to turn out and vote. At the individual level, specific kinds of media exposure encourage people to turn out and vote, whereas other kinds are more likely to discourage people from electoral participation. All in all, this paper finds support for the notion that both media exposure and media contexts have the ability to mobilize electorates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines two competing sets of assumptions about parties' priorities regarding political finance regulations. The central difference between these is whether parties view revenues as a means to a political end, or whether they instead view fund-raising as an end in itself. Each view yields slightly different predictions about the types of reforms various parties are likely to endorse under different political circumstances. The paper examines how well these propositions compare with actual party behavior during party finance reform debates over the past half century in Germany, a country where the issue has repeatedly surfaced. Experiences here suggest that even when scandals lend the issue of party finance high salience, parties are seldom willing to sacrifice sure economic gains for possible political payoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Built on previous literature of deracialization and white voting behavior, this paper empirically tests how the effectiveness of deracialization, measured by white crossover vote, may be conditional, dependent on urban racial contexts. Using the newly developed ecological inference (EI) method, the paper examined 81 back candidates’ white votes in New Orleans biracial elections between 1977 and 1998. The results of OLS multiple regression show that the differences in white crossover voting in New Orleans during the last two decades were related to black candidates’ strength, measured by incumbency status and newspaper endorsement. The relatively larger effect of newspaper endorsement on white crossover voting, compared to that of black incumbency, confirms previous findings regarding the powerful influence of news media on biracial elections in general and the deracilization strategy in particular. The most important finding of this research, however, is that the deracialization strategy was most effective when white voters were no longer the majority in the urban elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why people ?violate? rationality and take part in their communities, differentiating by types of participation, particularly political versus other, more communal, types of participation. We argue that trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to participation. In addition, we posit that trust is strongly affected by economic inequality. Using aggregated American state level data for the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we present a series of two-stage least-squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on participation, controlling for other related factors. Findings indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust, and that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on political participation. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing public participation in policy making in terms of (a) the setting in which the deliberation takes place as well as (b) the particular staging of that exchange can enhance our understanding of the dynamics of policy deliberation. Portraying political processes as sequences of staged performances of conflict and conflict-resolution, always with a particular audience in place, the paper analyses how the design of the setting effects what is said, what can be said, and what can be said with influence. Drawing on an elaborate case study on regional planning, this paper aims to shed light on the ?performative? dimension of policy making. The analysis does not merely help to understand the failure of many participatory arrangements. It also gives a new perspective on policy learning and opens a perspective on how a policy deliberation may be conducted in a more democratic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 means parties will have to rethink one of their favored tools for enforcing party discipline: soft money. The current paper explores one possible replacement for party money, campaign contributions from the leadership political action committees (PACs) of other members of Congress, created expressly to funnel funds to their colleagues. The project attempts to answer the question: Do legislator-donors make contributions to support their own ideological positions, or to support the ideological position of their party? I find that Republicans make contributions to candidates who are ideologically close to their party in competitive districts, but ideologically close to themselves in safe districts. In contrast, Democrats give to candidates who are ideologically proximate to themselves in both competitive and safe districts. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]