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Ambivalence is an important concept in the study of American public opinion and voting behavior, particularly given an increasingly polarized political class. However, some studies of ambivalence are based on a problematic measure. Because many survey respondents do not answer the questions used to measure partisan ambivalence, the resulting measure does a poor job of distinguishing between ambivalence and indifference (or apathy) toward the political parties and their presidential candidates. The challenge is determining who closely related the two concepts are. We re-examine a common measure of political ambivalence based on data from the American National Election Studies (ANES). We model the survey response as a twostep process in which the respondent first decides whether to share an opinion and then reveals the direction and magnitude of that opinion. We find strong evidence of selection bias among non-respondents to the ANES items commonly used to measure ambivalence. More importantly, our analyses suggest that some ambivalent citizens may be hiding their evaluations of the parties and their presidential candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the geographic patterns of the casting and counting of provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Duval County, Florida, and Baltimore, Maryland in the 2006 election. Provisional voting refers to a voting option that enable voters who claim to be registered, but are not on the voting lists, to vote. It is said that provisional voting is concentrated in places where voters move a lot or people lack resources. One of the factors that affect geographic concentration of provisional voting is decentralized election administration.

The article presents a study which examined the consequences of residual votes in pre-Election Day voting in the U.S. It considers residual votes in gubernatorial elections at the county level in six states during the 2002 general election, as well as the residual votes in the presidential election and ballot measures voting in 2004. The study also assesses early and absentee voting reforms, and their impact on turnout.

Debates over urban school reform have become voluminous and heated, and scholarly research has focused primarily on the impact of various reforms. Research should also trace the impact of conflicts over political reform on voting in school board elections. We examine three school board elections in St. Louis between 2003 and 2006. In each election, the mayor organized a supported a slate of reform candidates to enact significant reforms in the public school system. The slate won the first election and lost the next two elections. Common theories of voting in city elections fail to adequately explain voting in these elections. St. Louis is a city with a tradition of machine-style patronage politics, and we find evidence of class-based conflict over political reform. The reform cleavage played an increasing role in the city's school board elections as campaigns focused more on debates over reform versus politics as usual. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2000 presidential election focused the attention of Americans on the problem of residual votes, the difference between the number of voters going to the polls and the number of valid votes cast for a particular contest. Recent election reform activity in the United States has been devoted to voting equipment, while there is little research on the effects of ballot design. We argue that residual votes are analogous to survey non-response, and that researchers can draw from studies of questionnaire design in self-administered surveys to identify ballot features that may simplify or complicate the voting process. In a pilot study of five states in the 2002 midterm elections, we identified seven ballot features associated with high levels of unrecorded votes in gubernatorial races, which are near the top of the ballot. Our current study is a larger analysis of ballot design in the 2004 general election. We apply our ballot design analysis to voting in the presidential election and on ballot initiatives in the 2004 election. We analyze ballots from roughly 266 counties and towns around the country that used paper-based ballots (either optically scanned or hand-counted ballots). Our preliminary results suggest that ballot design has a significant impact on the ability of people to record their votes, especially in down-ballot contest like initiatives. These results have implications for direct democracy and election reform in the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Washington: The Real No-Spin ZoneAbstractA broad and enduring belief holds that strategic politicians are often able to reframe issues when existing issue definitions are working to their disadvantage. Both scholars and journalists have written extensively about the process by which clever advocates push new frames that alter the way in which an issue is understood. The best known example of this is the reframing of late term abortions as "partial birth abortions." We test this basic proposition, drawing on a large-scale study of Washington policymaking. Specifically, we utilize more than 300 interviews conducted for 98 separate cases to measure the frequency of reframing. We monitored these 98 issues over time from our initial interviews to a follow-up interview 18-24 months later. Our conclusion is that full or partial reframing is exceedingly rare. Three broad lines of reasoning provide a framework for understanding why reframing is so uncommon. In turn we discuss explanations relating to resources, political realities, and beliefs. We conclude by arguing that initial frames tend to be stable and over time debate revolves around the core, not the surface of issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research offers a systematic look at how advocates' goals, the magnitude of the policy changes they seek, and the salience of the policy issues they care about shape the arguments and tactics advocates employ on a random sample of 98 issues. Our data show that the process of advocacy differs considerably for status quo supporters and challengers. Supporters of the status quo engage in far fewer activities than do challengers, and they are much more likely to make negative claims about the policy options proposed by others and ignore the virtues of the policy they support. Although the data did not reveal many linkages between salience and argument use, we did observe a relationship between conflict-expanding tactics and greater issue salience. The magnitude and type of policy change that was sought had minimal impact on the arguments and tactics used by advocates. Overall, our investigation demonstrates that there are compelling patterns to the advocacy process in Washington that may help to explain the movement or lack thereof that we observe. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular accounts of interest group influence in the policy process often focus on organizational budgets and campaign contributions, asserting that these resources lead to outcomes that are most preferred by "special" interest groups. Scholarly work that has attempted to assess this influence, however, has come to no set conclusion - sometimes resources lead to influence, sometimes they do not, and sometimes the results are inconclusive. To address the question of whether increased financial resources leads to preferred policy outcomes, we make use of a set of 98 randomly selected U.S. national policy issues about which we have conducted more than 300 interviews and collected extensive secondary source information on more than 1,200 organized interests. Our data include information on a broad range of indicators of financial resources, as well as non-material resources such as governmental allies and group membership. We find that when resources are considered by group type, businesses and other occupational organizations have the clear advantage, especially for material resources. These findings confirm those of numerous previous surveys of interest groups in Washington. When analyzed at the issue level, however, we find that material resources tend to be fairly evenly split on each side of an issue. Poorer citizen groups often cooperate with more well-to-do business and professional organizations, and the citizen groups bring other resources to the table, including membership numbers and public legitimacy. Resource-rich organizations were no more likely than resource-poor organizations to be on the winning side of the policy debate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first in a series of papers reporting the final results of the Advocacy and Public Policymaking Project (http://lobby.la.psu.edu). We interviewed 315 policy advocates and government officials centrally involved in a random sample of 98 issues reflecting the full range of policy activities of the federal government during the last two years of the Clinton Administration and the first two years of the Bush Administration. In this paper we focus on the structure of policy conflict. Each of our 98 issues was conceptually multidimensional and understood in such a way by everyone involved. Policy debate surrounding the issues, however, was far more limited.. We map out the structure of policy disagreement across our issues, describing the surprisingly small numbers of distinct perspectives active on each case. Our findings help understand the causes of low-dimensionality in Washington debates. These structural features are broader than institutional design alone, and stem from the nature of the professional and knowledge-based communities surrounding the policies; the continuing nature of debates, which creates a strong status-quo bias; cost issues; and political and gate-keeping efforts. The paper is the first to lay out these dimensional structures and to describe the nature of policy disagreement and political conflict in a random sample of issues. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]