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While a growing number of political scientists have begun to assimilate the explosion of research being done at the intersection of the evolutionary and cognitive sciences, theorists and historians of political thought (with a few notable exceptions) have so far ignored it. This tendency runs against the grain of the tradition of political philosophy, in which moral philosophy has routinely been informed by rigorous natural philosophy. Montesquieu is a paradigmatic example of this synthesis. His navigation of the fault line between "moral and physical causes" - his map of "the empire of climate" - directly informed his conclusions about which institutional arrangements were most suitable for the organization of human government. His example can serve as a model for theory that is more conscious both of nature's constraints and the possibility of cultural evolution, as well as history that is more attentive to how philosophers have conceived of the biological situation of human nature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time analysis has become a common design element of surveys, such as panels and rolling-cross sectional designs, and they provide the opportunity to analyze the effect of predicted and unpredicted events over time. These designs still have trouble overcoming selection bias, especially for unanticipated events that are of interest. Matching methods have provided political scientists with a new set of tools with which to minimize selection bias and analyze observational studies. However, how to apply these methods to time-series analysis is a question that has not been fully explored. The instability of many covariates over time poses problems, as does the fact that the day-to-day sampling sizes are often small. Using the 1988 Canadian National Election Studies data and the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, I explore different constraints on time using genetic matching to determine what approaches are best for a time-series analysis employing matching methods. The 1988 CNES, in which Johnston et al found a large debate effect, provides evidence that matching methods can help overcome selection bias for large unpredicted events and allow for a causal analysis over time. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contentious debate over the relationship between institutional design and student academic achievement (Smith 2005). We further the school choice debate by considering the relationship between different types of school institutions, parental and community variables and third grade student test scores using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) data. Though it has been infrequently used by political scientists (Cox and Witko 2008), this panel data set allows us to overcome problems that plague many school choice studies by examining the academic performance of the same students over time, holding unobserved child-level variables constant. It is also unique in that it follows younger children. Since it is large and nationally representative, this data set also allows us to make generalizable conclusions. We demonstrate that academic performance is unlikely to be improved by simply attending a school of choice, public or private, and instead argue that parental variables and other aspects of a school's institutional environment and community are more important, though still modest, determinants of academic achievement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious fundamentalists have been vocal in their opposition to embryonic stem (ES) cell research. In this paper, I investigate the influence one's religious beliefs have on political behavior. Specifically, the paper explores the impact Christian fundamentalism has on opposition/support for the 2006 Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative. Using the Roper Center for Public Opinion's exit polling, the findings suggest that white, conservative, Republicans who self-identify as Evangelical Christian and attend religious services at least once a week were significantly more likely to vote against the ballot measure in the 2006 mid-term election. Therefore, political scientists should consider the influence religion has on voting behavior, particularly concerning controversial biomedical research using human embryos. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on white racial attitudes has emphasized a shift from overt to new, more subtle forms of racial prejudice. Racism researchers have argued that overt racist sentiments concerning lesser black ability and the need for racial segregation have subsided among whites and are no longer politically potent. But there is one area of racial policy that has received less scrutiny from political scientists and seems particularly prone to the effects of overt racism â€" policies designed to integrate residential housing. We look at the determinants of white attitudes toward housing policies and find that overt racism continues to play a powerful role in opposition to policies designed to increase racial integration. Findings are based on data from a telephone survey of NY state residents conducted in the fall of 2000. Racist opposition to integrated housing policies is based on the personal relevance of racial policies. It is evident in areas of low and medium but not high average income; its effects are found when middle class blacks but not poor blacks are described as the target of integration policies. This finding suggests that threat and racism are interrelated. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent empirical studies have demonstrated what political scientists have long warned; that the political opinions of the wealthy are better reflected in the decisions of elected officials and in government policies compared to the opinions of the poor. But for unequal political representation to occur, there must be variation in political preferences across income groups. Two recent articles in PS: Political Science & Politics cast doubt on the proposition that political preferences vary much depending on one's income (Soroka and Wlezien 2008; Ura and Ellis 2008). In contrast, using multiple sources of survey data, I find citizens with lower incomes are more likely to support increased spending on redistributive policies such as aid to the poor and food stamps compared to citizens with higher incomes and that these differences are larger than those based on education or gender. I also find that citizens with low incomes are more socially conservative than the affluent. Finally, I find some evidence that differences in political preferences extend to within the states as well, which has important consequences for the understudied concern of political inequality at the state level. Together, the opinion data presented here generally shows important differences in political preferences and priorities based on citizens' incomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists have devoted a great deal of scholarly attention to the characterization of the preferences of Supreme Court justices. These theoretical perspectives have led to a variety of expectations and findings regarding the behavior of the Supreme Court. In the current analysis I formulate a theoretical model of the hierarchy of justice that departs from past conceptions of Supreme Court decision-making in that preferences over case outcomes are posited to be temporally non-separable. This result is implied by the recognition that the parties who respond to and are affected by Supreme Court decisions respond within the context of existing legal policy. It is posited that when making decisions justices will look to optimize the body of legal policy (instead of just the case being decided) with respect to preferences. I empirically test this result by introducing various measures of the liberalism of the cumulative body of past Supreme Court decisions (in the aggregate of cases as well as sub-divided by policy area) to the standard time series models of Supreme Court liberalism that appear in the literature. The results strongly support the claim that Justices target the body of legal policy, not just case outcomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists are currently paying significant attention to the impact of voter mobilization. They have mostly concentrated on the mode of mobilization and have paid less attention to the content of these campaign appeals. We investigate whether campaign appeals can mobilize and persuade ethnic minorities, in particular Latinos and African-Americans. The effects of mobilization may be more prevalent among these groups because they are less participatory than the voting population as a whole. We measure different aspects of campaign advertising, such as the language of the ad, whether minorities are depicted, and whether the ad speaks to issues salient to the group. These advertising data are then linked to survey data on voter turnout and vote choice. We find that Spanish-language ads do affect the vote choice and turnout of Latinos, but that issue content (e.g., civil rights or immigration) matters less. The paper also lays out a useful empirical strategy for investigating how subsets of the American electorate respond to specific campaign themes, a question that will become even more important if campaigns continue to engage in segmentation and microtargeting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Bush v. Vera, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the violation of “traditional districting principles” such as geographical compactness and whether district lines are to be drawn over existing political subdivisions can cause “expressive harms” to voters and politicians â€" perhaps by undermining trust in government and confusing voters. But political scientists have found little evidence of such harms (Altman 1998; but see Engstrom 2000). This research has focused exclusively on the U.S. House of Representatives and utilized only American National Election Study data. Further, this literature has ignored an important district characteristic: population size. Federalist and Anti-Federalist writings show a deep belief that district population can impact the communication linkage between representatives and constituents. To fill these gaps in the literature, I use survey data from the Pew Research Center and the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and examine whether district characteristics like population size and compactness effect citizen attitudes toward government at the state level. To accurately test the effects of such district and state level characteristics on individual opinions, I utilize multilevel modeling. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, mass political attitudes have been considered a force that powerfully shapes the process of democratization. To unravel their linkage empirically, an increasing number of political scientists have recently argued that the democratization of a political system depends on the extent to which its citizens demand democracy relative to what political institutions supply. In testing such models of democratic demand and supply, however, they have mistakenly equated democratic demand with the extent to which citizens prefer democracy to its alternatives. In this study, we first argue that popular demand for democracy is not the same thing as democratic regime preference or support. Instead, it constitutes unfavorable or critical orientations toward democracy-in-practice. By analyzing the fourth wave of the World Values Surveys, we demonstrate that critical democratic spirits promote democratic development more powerfully than the two attitudinal variables—democratic regime support and self-expression values—that have been identified in prior public opinion research as the forces driving democratization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do states worry about civil war spillover? A number of recent studies have examined the international and particularly regional impacts of civil conflict. Political scientists have only recently begun to examine the spillover impacts of civil war, but are national leaders cognizant of the threat? This paper argues that states do indeed anticipate civil war spillover, and increase their military spending after civil conflict next door. The increase is exacerbated in the presence of certain conditions that might make spillover more likely. Increases in military spending often reduce funds available for development, thus increasing the likelihood of civil war. Thus the diffusion of fear shown by increases in military expenditures can contribute to the diffusion of civil war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African-American political scientists have been contending for some time that political coalitions between African-Americans and Latinos can transform American politics. For a number of reasons, these coalitions may not be likely: Latinos are more likely to call for assimilation into the broader American culture, whereas this is much more problemmatic for African-American politics and culture. Secondly, Latinos are higher rates of intermarriage with whites. Third, Latinos have a higher rate of suburbanization than African-Americans, and fourth, Hispanics, particularly Cuban and secondly Mexican-Americans, may share more conservative political views than the mass of African-Americans. The paper contends that if Hispanics in the future enter into widespread multiracial political coaltions, it will be with whites, not African-Americans. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant portion of political science research involves, in some form or other, the relationship between actors' preferences and the decisions they make. In particular, many political scientists have examined the role the decision-making process plays in translating actors' preferences into votes or other kinds of actions. However, it is difficult to fully assess the influence of the decision-making process on the positions actors take without knowing actors' sincere preferences. The personal papers of Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Lewis F. Powell contain a measure of their private, pre-oral argument preferences. I compare these pre-argument preferences to conference votes on the merits and find that in a significant minority of cases, justices' conference votes deviate from their pre-oral argument positions. The data demonstrate that justices' positions are fluid at this early, pre-opinion drafting stage and suggest that their positions are influenced by the intervening institutional factor of oral arguments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robust and active civil society is fundamental for democracy to succeed. Many political scientists have lamented the decline in traditional forms of civil society, warning of an imperiled form of democracy in the United States. This paper provides evidence that civil society is burgeoning in a new form, thanks to new technology. Today, citizens have more and varied outlets through which to add their voice to political debates and elections. This, in turn, encourages greater political participation and voter turn-out. Social networking communities allow citizens to connect to one another via varied organizations. Today, instead of people forming a neighborhood organization, citizens are turning to the internet to connect with others, utilizing networking websites to form organizations. These forms of civil society may be a casual cooking club or a group that plays basketball together each weekend. While pursuing these activities, people are also discussing issues that are important to them. Yes, the old form of civil society may be extinct, but this new, more-connected version proves that democracy is still alive and well. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state has never held the mythical power that many contemporary political scientists and philosophers have attributed it. The true impact of globalization has not been to weaken states, but to create and establish new political elites within it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore the relationship between civic engagement and democratic practice. I suggest that the traditional model of civic engagement does not capture the distinctive engagement of many young people today and is limited in three crucial ways: an inflexible model of organizational commitment, an antiquated understanding of contemporary group membership, and the assumption that nearly all forms of engagement are equal in the sense of efficacy that they convey to participants. A new model inspired by participatory culture is necessary. A contemporary model of civic engagement, Engagement 2.0, suggests that the NDM represents a new space for political changeâ??a space that has been overlooked by many political scientists. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For generations political scientists have probed the linkages between political parties and interest groups in the United States, typically characterizing groups as influencing partisan agendas, candidate nominations, and the recruitment of campaign activists. Using panel survey data gathered on local caucus participants, we explore the potential reciprocity between party-based and interest group-based engagement. We find that interest group activism spills over into involvement in partisan campaigns, but campaigning also raises levels of activity over time within interest groups. Family and friendship networks appear to be a key factor determining how much overlap exists between these two domains of political involvement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the use of models has come to dominate much of the scientific study of politics, our understanding of the role or function that models play in the scientific enterprise has not kept pace. Political science clings to an outdated theory-based approach to scientific inference known as hypothetico-deductivism. We argue for a new approach to scientific inference that highlights the centrality of models in scientific reasoning, avoids the pitfalls of the hypothetico-deductive method, and offers political scientists a new way of thinking about the relationship between the natural world and the models with which we are so familiar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper explores the renewed turn to biology social inquiry. I argue that there are multiple ways that nature can be conceptualized in social inquiry and that a Kantian model offers advantages that political scientists should find appealing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My goal is to improve how political scientists and practitioners conceptualize and measure civic competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists often retell an historical story of the creation of the United States Constitution. They could add to it by employing a comparative approach and the study of voting behavor in decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists since Anthony Downs (1957) have hypothesized that more policy information leads to a higher voter turnout. To empirically test this hypothesis, we conducted an Internet-based randomized field experiment during Japan's 2004 Upper House election. Japan's 2004 election is ideal for testing our hypothesis because political parties prepared ``manifestos'' that include formal proposals for major policy issues. We find that voters are less likely to abstain when they receive policy information about {it both} ruling and opposition parties through their official party websites. The information effects are larger among those voters who were planning to vote but were undecided about which party to vote for. Our findings also shed light on the role of the Internet as an important source of information for voters. Methodologically, this paper illustrates how to design and analyze Internet-based randomized field experiments, which are becoming increasingly common in the social sciences. Our experimental approach avoids the problem of endogenous information acquisition, which is inherent when using observational studies to estimate the causal effects of information on voting behavior. Furthermore, we employ a randomized block design to ensure efficient randomization, and apply a Bayesian statistical model to account for noncompliance and nonresponse, the two prevailing problems of field experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Blogging," the act of writing and maintaining an on-line journal, is an increasingly popular form of political expression among elites and non-elites alike. Indeed, recent studies of blogging suggest that there may be as many as 1 million political "blogs" on the internet. Despite this increasing popularity, however, political blogs have received very little attention in the political science literature. This paper attempts to address this oversight by doing three things. First, I discuss the growth and evolution of the political blogging phenomenon and attempt to offer an efficient and reliable operational definition of political blogs. Second, with this operational definition of political blogging in mind, I identify four questions that are likely to be of interest to political scientists: (1) how political blogging effects political bloggers? (2) which factors influence an individual's decision to engage in political blogging? (3) what impact the political blogosphere has on social level variables? (4) what independent variables explain the content of political blogs? Finally, I attempt to shed some light on these questions by selecting a random sample of political blogs on the internet and engaging in a systematic content analysis of their texts. In the end, I conclude that a combination of content analysis of political blogs and surveys of political bloggers is the best method for understanding the who's, what's and why's of political blogging.

We introduce attributable effects and full matching to political scientists as a way to estimate treatment effects for binary dependent variables in field experiments and observational studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many political scientists have been searching for a national realignment among the American electorate in recent political history. Individuals who examine political behavior and party systems with strict periodization requirements in mind expected a ?critical realignment? to occur during the 1960s. After examining past historical instances at the national level, it would seem as though a realignment did not occur as expected. A durable partisan change in the national electorate resulting in a new majority political party assuming power, and the implementation of sweeping public policy changes (as occurred during the Civil War in the 1860s and the New Deal realignment during the 1930s) remains elusive. The value of examining whether a realignment has occurred only at the national level is questionable, however, since a single focus on national electoral and partisan patterns likely obscures changes occurring at sub-national levels. This paper investigates the possibility of regional realignment by examining the change in partisan identification among whites residing in one discrete region of the United States: the Northeast. Multivariate logit analyses are employed in order to uncover the generational, social group, and attitudinal factors contributing to change in the partisan identification of whites in the Northeast using National Election Studies survey data, 1972-2000. The findings support the notion that whites in the Northeast are more Democratic than Republican in terms of their partisan identification over time. However, the underlying contributing factors, and the magnitude and direction of partisan change vary according to the classification of the partisan identification dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scholars have long debated citizen competence and whether or not average Americans can effectively play their part in a democratic system. In recent years this discussion has been dominated by the notion of heuristics, and by the optimistic argument that average citizens can use simple cues to compensate for their narrow knowledge base and less than systematic reasoning processes. Our paper calls this argument into question by noting a simple fact; before people can use heuristic cues, they must possess them; any potential benefits from heuristic reasoning logically depend on citizens perceiving and acquiring such cues. And our findings suggest that people perceive and acquire--and use--political cues less frequently than political scientists have supposed. In a completed set of studies, we exposed subjects (n=300) to experimental manipulations that varied several aspects of cue presentation; the sources who were providing the cues, the information environment in which cues were presented, and the nature of the cues themselves. Subjects were exposed to cue treatments on several proposed public policies, including long-term health care and juvenile justice. Following this exposure we measured subjects’ policy preferences on these matters to determine whether cue exposure had affected preferences. Finally, we measured subjects’ recognition of several types of information that had been presented. We tested for recognition of heuristic cues--most obviously--but also for recognition of specific details of policy proposals, information about the horse race aspects of policy competition, and recognition of non-political human interest information about persons discussed in connection with the policy competition and policy proposals. The data demonstrate two basic results. First, cues generally failed to affect subjects’ policy positions. Second, as indicated above, our results suggest that citizens perceive heuristic cues less often than we might suppose. Cues were recognized at lower rates than virtually any other kind of offered information; aggregating across issues, generally less than half of subjects were able to recognize cues immediately after they had been presented. Moreover, when results were disaggregated by levels of general political knowledge, citizens with low general knowledge fared particularly poorly in recognizing presented cues. These finding suggest a general caution regarding the utility of heuristic reasoning, since cues seem to have little effect on citizens’ opinions. More interestingly, our results suggest that there are two tracks leading to cue ineffectiveness. Well-informed citizens seem to perceive and acquire proffered cues, but these cues have little effect on reasoning, a result consistent with the various literatures showing high opinion stability among such individuals. Most importantly, poorly-informed citizens largely fail to perceive cues in the first place. This seems to represent a devastating blow to the basic suppositions of the heuristic reasoning model; it suggests that those citizens most needing help from cues seem least able to even perceive or acquire them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) has increasingly become a forum within which countries are publicly named and shamed for abusing their citizens, the practices of the commission have gone largely ignored by political scientists. Consequently, in this study, we report the results of the analysis of actions taken by the UNHRC and voting records of commission members in the 1977-2001 period. We document trends in commission shaming practices and assess various models to test hypotheses derived from three theoretical perspectives. These are a realist ?organized hypocrisy? perspective in which naming and shaming is a political exercise, a liberal ?reputation? perspective in which commission actions are efforts to hold states accountable for their promises, and a constructivist ?social conformity? perspective in which commission behavior is a response to the allocation of social rewards and punishments that induce adherence to global norms. We find support for all three theses and conclude that the reputation and conformity arguments became stronger explanations for commission behavior over time. More specifically, we find that the commission targeted and punished countries for their actual human rights practices, that liberal states were inclined to go after countries for their abuses, that states held others accountable for their commitment to (human rights) treaties, and that states with a generally poor record of global cooperation were singled out more frequently than were states that actively participated in cooperative endeavors such as peacekeeping operations. We also find that commission practices became decidedly less political over time and that the aforementioned tendencies were stronger in the post-Cold War than in the Cold War period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists have generally viewed the enactment of single representative, winner-take-all congressional districts in the United States as a two-sided issue. Some contend that this system is simply an artifact of the government’s foundation and the British political tradition. Others argue that this archaic system was never reformed in order to ward off third party challenges. In this paper I argue to the contrary that the self-interested drive for seats by Whig politicians led to the elimination of multi-member House districts. That self-interest was unrelated to minor parties. It reflected instead the different electoral strategies of the major parties as well as the different constituencies of northern and southern Whig politicians. The multimember districts that existed at the time (and made up approximately 20% of House seats) benefited the more agrarian Democrats over the more urban Whigs. However, for southern Whigs, the elimination of multimember districts did not produce a clear electoral advantage and potentially even created a disadvantage because of it’s conflict with slaveholding interests and a states’ rights philosophy. Statistical tests demonstrated that while northern Whigs overwhelmingly supported and Democrats overwhelmingly opposed mandatory single-member districts, opposition to the mandate by southern Whigs related directly to the percent of the population in bondage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social groups have long been an area of interest to political scientists. One of the most prominent and enduring social membership is religious affiliation. No religious group has been more eminent in recent times than Evangelicals. Since the emergence of the New Christian Right in the late 1970s, Evangelicals have become a potent political force in U.S. politics, shifting the composition of the New Deal coalition and bolstering the Republican Party. This social movement marked a new era for this religious group as their traditional message of individual salvation was now conflated with the quest for conservative public policy. Many studies have focused on the leaders and mobilization efforts of this movement. A separate group of studies have looked at the general Evangelical population. One line of research of the latter is the political implications of religiosity. While substantial knowledge has been generated on individual religious practices and beliefs, very little comparative work has been done. This research addresses this absence by determining which religiosity measure explains the largest portion of political conservatism among Evangelicals. This study first compares Evangelicals with other religious groups. Evangelicals’ political conservatism, in terms of policy attitudes and party affiliation, and high levels of religiosity are proven especially in contrast to their more mainstream protestant counterparts. In addition, Evangelicals display high levels of political participation. Then, using simple regressions, this study tests two possible explanations for the political differences between Mainline Protestants and Evangelicals—social class and various religiosity measures. Political orientation is tested as well but only as a benchmark value. The effect of overall religiosity is also measured. The results show: 1) social class has little affect on these political differences; 2) the cognitive sphere of religion such as doctrine and the personal-subjective sphere of religion which includes salience and devotionalism have the most influence on policy attitudes and party vote; and 3) the social-collective components of religious such as involvement in church and religious groups account for the most differences in political activism among Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants. Thus, this study suggests that certain religious observances led to certain political outcomes. There are several more notable findings. First, this study found that overall religiosity has an almost all-encompassing “conservatizing” effect on policy attitudes. Second, although religiosity, in general, has a significant affect on party vote, it has an overall negative influence on party identification. Finally, this analysis demonstrates that while measurable religiosity accounts for a substantial portion of political conservatism, it either does not capture religiosity effectively or there are other reasons for Evangelical’s political circumstance. This knowledge provides more precision to the study of factors shaping Evangelicals’ political outlook. What one can conclude is that religiosity has a broad effect on Evangelicals’ political attributes. Furthermore, this study implies that religiosity cannot be treated uniformly as espousal of one or two over others may produce a specific political outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of the treaty ratification process has received scant attention by political scientists. We seek to fill this gap in the literature. Conventional understanding is that treaties are almost always ratified, and hence the process is uninteresting in a political sense. However, the observation that presidents use executive agreements rather than treaties in order to bypass the politicized process in the Senate belies this conventional wisdom. To address these concerns systematically we analyze the politics surrounding the treaty ratification process for all treaties transmitted to the Senate from 1949-2000, a data set of 850 treaties. Specifically we examine the success presidents have in moving treaties through the various stages of the process and the duration of the process through the committee to eventual ratification. Our analyses highlight important political dynamics left unconsidered by previous analyses. Theoretically, while partisan theories do not explain much of the process, hypotheses related to pivotal politics theory do. Politics play an important role in delaying diplomacy in the U.S. Senate. This research is supported financially through a Dirksen Congressional Research Award, 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of research have demonstrated that race helps to determine socioeconomic outcomes. Recently, sociologists have gone a step further to show that skin color,along with race, also affects socioeconomic outcomes; lighter blacks and Latinos have higher incomes and more education, and (in some studies) lower rates of incarceration and unemployment, than do their darker-skinned counterparts. The effect of race on political participation is somewhat less certain, but most studies show that in recent years blacks are less likely to vote than Anglos of a similar status. We do not know, however, whether skin color shapes political behavior as much as it affects SES. Our question for this paper, in short, is: What is the effect of skin color on African Americans’ political activity? To our knowledge, no one has systematically studied the role of skin color in electoral participation. Therefore we initially hypothesize that political participation follows the same pattern as income and education – that is, that light-skinned blacks engage in more, and more effective, political activity than do dark-skinned blacks. This could occur for several reasons: 1) Light-skinned blacks have more social capital (education, contacts with people outside their family, higher status jobs) and real capital (incomes) than do dark-skinned blacks, which they convert into political capital 2) Light-skinned blacks are more available to be mobilized by political parties and activists because they belong to more organizations, have deeper social networks, attend church more frequently, and so on. 3) Light-skinned blacks feel more efficacious, optimistic, connected with their locality or nation, or otherwise persuaded that politics matters and that their participation in politics can make a positive difference. Alternatively, the positive relationship posited in the paragraph above has changed over time, in accord with Hochschild’s argument in Facing Up to the American Dream. If that is correct, we will find that the positive relationship between light skin/high SES and political participation in the 1960s disappeared by the 1990s, mainly because well-off (light-skinned) blacks lost faith in the American dream and therefore stopped engaging in politics. As a final alternative, we may find that political activity does not and never did track SES; that is, the reasons that light-skinned blacks do better in the schools, labor market, and society do not carry over into the political realm. We will use five sets of survey data. All have a large sample of blacks, and all have an interviewer-determined measure of skin tone. They are: 1) the Negro Political Participation Study of 1962; 2) the 15-City (Kerner Commission) Study of 1968; 3) the National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) of 1980; 4) the 2nd wave of the NSBA of 1988; and 5) the Multi-city Survey of Urban Inequality of 1994. None is ideal, but together they offer the breadth and depth needed to open up this new field of inquiry. This paper will enable us to compare the social, economic, and political consequences of different skin tones among African Americans. Regardless of exactly how the analyses turn out, the paper will make it clear that political scientists need to take skin color, not just race, into account in making sense of the American racial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An accepted view among political observers and social scientists is that the parties (and partisans) have become increasingly polarized and coherent in recent years with regard to their positions on the issues. This study produces a longitudinal analysi [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest group activity, from political scientists’ and especially group representatives’ points of view, is a complex mix of group policy interests and organizational capacities that are translated into advocacy tactics intended to influence public policy. This paper asks whether there are systematic relationships among these components of group activity. One line of the literature, perhaps best exemplified by Jeff Berry’s (1977) survey of the early public interest movement and Jack Walker’s (1991) project, asserts that an interest group’s strategic choices are a function of membership characteristics, financial sources (that is, mass membership, foundation, corporate or government financing), organizational capacities, and the opportunities and constraints presented in the political environment. The alternate view is that group activity seems to be very unpredictable and nondeterministic. Such a view would be solidly grounded in Arthur Bentley’s (1908) foundational text in the subfield. However, the most contemporary representative might be Heinz, Laumann, Nelson, and Salisbury (1993, xvi), who suggest that one of the alternative meanings of their “Hollow Core” title is that “there is no there there” inside the advocacy structures of Washington, D.C., interest representation. The paper employs latent variable structural equation modeling (using AMOS) to examine the relationships among interest groups’ financing bases, staff capacity, issue involvement, on the one hand, and the groups’ advocacy tactics and strategies. The data are drawn from a survey of 83 national interest groups in the environmental and energy policy arena (cf. McSpadden and Culhane, 1999). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists have studied the design and political impacts of different election systems for some time now, but it is only recently that they have turned their attention to the question of why governments choose to alter the rules under which their respective politicians stand for office. One important consequence of this increased scholarly attention is the finding that this phenomenon occurs more frequently than originally thought. Indeed, the growing literature on this important topic has shown that election system change occurs not only in the world’s established democracies but also in countries that recently made the transition to democracy. Moreover, a small number of studies have shown that manipulations of electoral rules have even occurred in countries that have not completely made the transition to democracy. Between 1948 and 2000 inclusive, sixteen elections were held for the South Korean National Assembly, and, in ten of these national contests, politicians stood for office under election rules that had been altered. While most of these changes were minor and involved shifts in the number of district and PR seats, three were substantial. The first involved the replacement of the SMD system with a mixed system while the second change involved retaining the PR portion of the mixed system but replacing the SMD portion with a system of multimember districts. The final change also retained the PR portion of the mixed system but abandoned the multimember districts by returning to a SMD format. Two of the substantial changes and half of the minor changes discussed above occurred before South Korea made the full transition to democracy. Indeed, the non-democratic governments that enacted these changes, while not extensively popular, were hardly in danger of being eliminated through the electoral process. This raises the interesting question of why these governments found it necessary to support such institutional changes. We show in this paper that such governments, like their counterparts in democratic nations, are concerned less with the imperatives of short-term seat maximization than with how the eventual inclusion of increasingly popular opposition groups will affect their ability to remain in power and influence policy outcomes. The examination of the Korean case allows us to accomplish this because of that fact that election system changes occurred both under conditions of democracy as well as under conditions before the democratic transition have been completed. We evaluate this hypothesis by showing that the governments of South Korea acted in accordance with long-term imperatives under both political conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, political scientists have made great strides in explaining the influences upon the US Supreme Court’s agenda. Our success in explaining cert. voting, however, has overshadowed our relative lack of systematic explanation of changes in the Court’s attention to issues over time. The attitudinal model championed by Segal and Spaeth argues that the Court’s attention to issues is primarily determined by the policy preferences of the justices. Charles Epp has argued that the justices’ policy preferences are seriously constrained by the support structure for legal mobilization in the public. Roy Flemming, B. Dan Wood and John Bohte, have found that the Court’s attention to issues is influenced by both the broader public agenda and by the other branches of government. My own dissertation research demonstrated that litigants and potential litigants can attract the Supreme Court’s attention by their behavior in lower courts. This paper will build an integrated model that tests these competing theories across multiple issue areas, including racial discrimination, abortion, and antitrust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two key puzzles about political legitimacy require answers grounded in empirical analysis of particular political systems: Does political legitimacy exist as an attitudinal among citizens, or is it just an invention of political scientists? And if legitimacy exists, how does it affect the behavior of citizens? This ?so what?? question about legitimacy has implications for political stability through its effects on levels and types of citizen political participation. In a companion paper, we have answered the first question in the affirmative, at least for one consolidated Third World democracy, Costa Rica, where we found seven distinct dimensions of legitimacy. In this paper we seek to resolve the second puzzle of legitimacy?s impact on citizen behavior. Empirical evidence from a 2002 national survey explores how legitimacy shapes citizens political participation and civil society activism. The relationships are complex, with some dimensions of legitimacy increasing some forms of participation while other dimensions reduce it. Belief in two dimensions of legitimacy, namely ?political community? and ?support for political actors,? encourages overall citizen engagement and local-level participation, while high levels of another dimension; ?system support? discourages them. Civil society activism overall is reduced by low ?support for regime institutions? but increased by ?support for local government.? Several legitimacy-participation relationships are curvilinear. We discuss these three relationship patterns for political stability and legitimacy theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has documented that public attitudes toward the news media have become dramatically more negative over that past 35 years. At the same time that public confidence in the press has declined, political scientist have become increasingly adept at demonstrating the massive influence the media exert over public opinion. This paper examines the question of what effect public attitudes towards the press have on the news media?s ability to influence the public beliefs. To do this, I utilize a Bayesian model of persuasion to develop predictions of the consequences if source judgments do play an important role in media influence. I then test these predictions using three very different datasets: a cross-sectional survey, a panel survey, and an experiment. The results from all three datasets confirm that those with positive feelings towards the media are more influenced by media messages than those with negative feelings. I briefly discuss the implications of these findings for democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, political scientists conducting quantitative analyses of the U.S Supreme Court have proceeded on the assumption that the justices make their voting decisions based upon their locations on an ideological continuum relative to the location of case stimuli along the same dimension. Thus, an individual case is located somewhere in ideological space, and a justice’s vote is determined by whether that justice is to the left or to the right of that case. As illuminating as our empirical models have been, the assumption driving them is, we believe, incorrect. Instead, we posit that in any give case the justices choose between two competing policy alternatives --- the policy offered by the petitioner and the policy offered by the respondent --- with each justice voting in favor of the alternative to which he or she is more proximate. In short, we offer a spatial model of Supreme Court voting. We offer and test a formal model of our theory. The results derived from our analysis provide a drastically different picture of the Court’s behavior. On the one hand, we find that the justices’ preferences do a better job of explaining their votes than even the strongest proponents of the attitudinal model claim. On the other hand, we find that the Court is far from one dimensional in its behavior, responding to such external forces as public opinion and the political composition of the elected branches of the federal government. Given the clarity and strength of our empirical results, the paper suggests the need to rethink not only our theory of the Court but also how we model its behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes remains relatively untested in comparative, multiparty contexts. Spending effects under the Single-Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system have received almost no attention from political scientists but that system’s facilitation of candidate centered voting with the otherwise conventional partisan context common in parliamentary democracies makes it especially interesting. Our study develops a model of competition and electoral success under STV and applies it to the Irish national election of May 2002. Using spending and electoral data gathered on 464 candidates from 42 constituencies to elect Ireland’s 166-member legislature, we parameterize and then statistically estimate the effects of candidate spending in both absolute and relative terms. Testing both inter- and intra-party spending effect we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between spending and electoral success. Increased spending on behalf of a candidate brings more votes for that candidate, in competition against not only all candidates but also in competition with own-party running mates. Increased spending also directly increases a candidate?s chance of winning a seat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the annual business meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) to be held in Red Lacquer room at Palmer House Hilton hotel in Chicago, Illinois on April2, 2011.

‘The third wave of democracy’ pushed political scientists to study transition to democracy. It led to democratization as a policy option for Western countries in the context of war against terror. The donor community came up with election assistance programmes on way to deepening democracy in various countries including Pakistan. This paper seeks to analyze the strategy, process and outcome of donors’ financial and technical input in the process of transition from military to civilian rule in Pakistan in 2008. Donors focused on empowerment of electoral management body following a technocratic approach to conducting free and fair elections. They failed to bring the ultimate stakeholders, political parties, on board, ensure the accuracy of electoral rolls and mobilize civil society to that end. International observer missions determined the fairness of elections, bypassing the pre-poll electoral malpractices. In the absence of legal and institutional reform, donor input from outside remained far from satisfactory. This paper argues that donor agenda for democratization is no substitute for internal mobilization based on empowerment of political parties cultivation of democratic ethos in the citizenry. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do leaders persist with morally questionable and politically destructive policies in the face of mounting evidence that the justifications in support of those policies were deeply flawed or the result of fraudulent manipulations of power? Economists refer us to the fallacy of sunk costs; psychologists turn to the theory of cognitive dissonance; political scientists draw widely from these disciplines but also address self-interested blame avoidance. This paper offers an alternative explanatory theory, the Creon Complex. The Creon Complex, drawn from and inspired by Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, highlights the role that fear and hubris play in foreclosing the possibilities of meaningful dialogue and mutual listening within the plural conditions of political life. While the morally loaded charge of hubris has come to play a significant role in contemporary political rhetoric (as it did in fifth century Athens) contemporary writers have not taken the full measure, ethically and politically speaking, of the threat that hubris represents for democratic societies. I aim to do so by showing how hubris not only poses a direct threat to the equal rights and integrity of others, but to the plural-political domain itself. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) play in influencing foreign aid decisions by states? Political scientists tend to neglect the importance of INGOs as an international and domestic actor, either because they argue that INGOs are not significant actors or that data limitations prevent empirical studies of INGOs. Instead, scholars have been interested in state level determinants of US foreign aid such as security-driven goals or ideological goals. This paper argues that INGOs play an important role in influencing aid decisions. INGOs function as a connecting bridge between developed and developing countries by providing information and logistics about developing countries and by mobilizing domestic support in the donor states on behalf of developing countries. This relationship is analyzed by using cross-national analysis of receipt and allocation of US foreign aid with newly collected data on INGO activities. This study finds that countries with more American INGO field projects are likely to receive more US foreign aid. This study sheds light on understanding not only US foreign aid allocation but also INGOs’ roles in the international world. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for the variation in the growth and success of Islamic parties?.x000d..x000d.Political scientists have viewed Islamic parties in Muslim-majority societies with various explanations. Fears of Islamic revivalism and Islamic theocracy led many to believe that these societies lacked the key ingredients for a viable transition to a consolidated democracy. Many proposed that if given the ability to freely run Islamic parties would win elections and take over regional and national governments in Muslim-majority societies. However, these ‘resonance’ explanations do not seem to tell the whole story since some Islamic parties win while others lose. .x000d..x000d.Based on extensive fieldwork in Pakistan, electoral ecology and game theoretic models, this project hopes to go beyond resonance accounts and make a contribution to the literature on comparative party politics (organizational strategy) and the political economy of religion, which locates explanations both at the individual level of analysisâ€"demand side for Islamic parties--and at the system level of analysis--in the institutional constraints under which the Islamic parties operate (supply-side). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a new automated method for identifying policy positions and saliencies from political texts. Political scientists use remarkably context-free, incomplete and invariant estimates of political parties' positions for testing dy- namic, policy-focused theories of parliamentary politics. Currently, we lack party position estimates on policy dimensions covering the full scope of parliamentary activity. Scholars must therefore make strong assumptions about the nature of the policy space when calculating ideological variables. This reduces sample sizes and increases the risk of selection bias. Our method "smart tags" political texts by using keywords from legislative databases. Positions and saliencies can then be estimated on the tagged subset of policy-relevant sentences. We apply our method to analyze the legislative positions and policy saliencies of political par- ties in the German parliament. We show that these estimates vary over time and across portfolios — variation which cannot be produced using existing methods. We believe our method simplifies preference estimation and increases construct validity of policy preference measures used to the evaluate policy-focused theories. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay highlights the translocal relations as a neglected, but significant unit of analysis in international relations. More systematic and empirical approaches to the role of local government in international issues need to be examined given that 1) local authorities have been playing noteworthy roles in tackling common international issues (i.e. climate change) and 2) these authorities are forming international networks in this process. By reviewing literature on the units of analysis in political science, I will address why local governments are ignored as important actors in international relations. Then I argue why the local authorities are important in international relations by using a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis in the context of local responses to a global environmental issue. After defining translocal relations, I propose the research directions of these relations emphasizing comparative local research, multi-level and multi-agent governance, and translocal networks. Developing the theory of translocal relations expects to expand the boundaries of IR, enabling political scientists to analyze variations in behaviors, policies, and networks of sub-national units of analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of whether or not failed and failing states produce international terrorism bedevils political scientists. A small, new body of empirical research demonstrates that state failure is positively related to incidents of international terrorism, while other theoretical and descriptive work either finds no such relationship or posits a negative relationship between failed states and terrorism. In this paper, I argue that these contradictory conclusions are the product of scholars adopting an overly aggregated conceptualization of state failure. I unpack state failure into 12 individual indicators, derived from the Failed State Index, and run a series of rare-events and negative binomial regression analyses on data from the ITERATE database. I find that not all components of state failure lead troubled countries to produce international terrorism. Rather, states afflicted specifically by severe refugee pressures, ethnic and social group conflict, praetorian behavior of military and intelligence communities, political elite factionalization and external military intervention are significantly more likely to have their nationals commit international terrorist attacks. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuation ratio model has been widely applied to medical and epidemiological.x000d.data but less to social science data. The model seems attractive for settings in which a researcher.x000d.is interested in explicit ordering of events. Indeed, any recurrent events process can.x000d.be construed of as being --ordinal'' insofar as subsequent events cannot occur until after prior events; however, this logic may not be naturally compelling in many applications. For example, in the analysis of civil wars, events can repeat but the waiting period events may be extraordinarily long. As such, the sequencing of events may not be of primary interest, even if repeatability of events is of interest. Put differently, events may repeat, but the order in which they repeat may not be of primary interest. A variety of models have been proposed for repeatable events, many of them by political scientists; however, none of these models account for explicit ordering. In this paper we consider a variety of models for these kinds of events processes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The (generalized) Hausman specification test is the gold-standard for political scientists using time-series cross-section data to check whether unit specific effects are correlated with right-hand-side variables. This paper deals with the econometric issue of testing for the necessity to eliminate unit specific effects in order to obtain unbiased estimation results. I analyse the finite sample properties and power of the Hausman specification test under conditions of inefficient fixed effects estimation and correlated unit specific effects by using Monte Carlo experiments. The analysis shows under what conditions, e.g. the size of the correlation between unit specific effects and explanatory variables, and the between-within variance ratio of right-hand-side variables, the Hausman test generates misleading results and researchers should be careful when using the Hausman-test or its variants to determine whether to employ a fixed effects or random effects specification. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of comparative politics (including myself) have measured populist attitudes at the elite level through textual analysis and at the mass level through surveys. In the United States, however, populism is studied by historians rather than behavioral political scientists, the latter of whom have preferred to develop alternative conceptualizations of mass and elite attitudes such as “stealth democracy.” I use three U.S. surveys to measure populist attitudes at the mass level. Two are recent rounds of the Utah Colleges Exit Poll (the June 2008 3rd District primary and the November General Election), conducted in a state where right-populist attitudes are more likely and where one of the Congressional races pitted a populist challenger against a pluralist incumbent. The third survey is the Cooperative Congressional Elections Survey (pre-election 2008), which lets us examine populist attitudes at the national level. All surveys include a four-question module to gauge populist attitudes, drawing from a series the author helped design for the 2008 AmericasBarometer survey. The Utah surveys also test a new module to measure pluralist attitudes, and the CCES includes Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s “stealth democracy” module. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]