Can Political Participation Prevent Crime? Results from a Field Experiment About Citizenship,Participation, and Criminality

Democratic theory and prior empirical work support the view that political participation, by promoting social integration and pro-social attitudes, reduces one’s propensity for anti-social behavior, such as committing crimes. Previous investigations examine observational data, which are vulnerable to bias if omitted factors affect both propensity to participate and risk of criminality or their reports. A field experiment encouraging 552,525 subjects aged 18–20 to register and vote confirms previous observational findings of the negative association between participation and subsequent criminality. However, comparing randomly formed treatment and control groups reveals that the intervention increased participation but did not reduce subsequent criminality. Our results suggest that while participation is correlated with criminality, it exerts no causal effect on subsequent criminal behavior.     

Big Five Personality Traits and Responses to Persuasive Appeals: Results from Voter Turnout Experiments

We examine whether Big Five personality traits are associated with heterogeneous responses to commonly used Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) appeals in both a survey and a field experiment. The results suggest that Big Five personality traits affect how people respond to the costs and benefits of voting highlighted in GOTV appeals. Our evidence also suggests that one trait—Openness—is associated with broad persuasibility, while others shape responses to particular types of messages. In some cases the conditioning effects of Big Five traits are substantial. For example, in the one-voter households (HHs) included in our field experiment, we find that a mailer that raised the specter of social sanctions increased the likelihood of voting by a statistically greater amount among those scoring high on Openness. The findings constitute an important step forward in understanding how core personality traits shape responses to various aspects of the act of voting.     

Do Perceptions of Ballot Secrecy Influence Turnout? Results from a Field Experiment

Although the secret ballot has been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we mailed information about protections of ballot secrecy to registered voters prior to the 2010 general election. Consistent with our survey data, we find that these letters increased turnout for registered citizens without records of previous turnout, but they did not appear to influence the behavior of citizens who had previously voted. The increase in turnout of more than three percentage points (20%) for those without previous records of voting is notably larger than the effect of a standard get‐out‐the‐vote mailing for this group. Overall, these results suggest that although the secret ballot is a long‐standing institution in the United States, beliefs about this institution may not match the legal reality.     

A theory of risk colonization: The spiralling regulatory logics of societal and institutional risk

Abstract

Explanations of the growing importance of risk to regulation identify three processes; the need to respond to newly created and discovered risks; the growth of regulatory frameworks; and the use of the risk instrument as an organizing idea for decision-making in modernity. Synthesizing these explanations, we propose a theory of risk colonization. We introduce a distinction between societal and institutional risks, the former referring to threats to members of society and their environment, and the latter referring to threats to regulatory organizations and/or the legitimacy of rules and methods of regulation. We argue that pressures towards greater coherence, transparency, and accountability of the regulation of societal risks can create institutional risks by exposing the inevitable limitations of regulation. In the first stage of risk colonization, framing the objects of regulation as ‘risks’ serves as a useful instrument for reflexively managing the associated institutional threats. This can be followed, in a second stage, by a dynamic tension between the management of societal and institutional risks that results in spiralling feedback loops. The very process of regulating societal risks gives rise to institutional risks, the management of which sensitizes regulators to take account of societal risks in different ways. We discuss links between this theory and the concept of governmentality and conclude with some speculations about the possible positive and negative consequences of risk colonization.     

Government Strength, Power Dispersion in Governments and Budget Deficits in OECD-Countries. A Voting Power Approach

We test for the influenceof government strength and dispersion ofpower among the parties of coalitiongovernments on the size of annual debtaccumulation through budget deficits inOECD-countries from 1970 to 1999.Government strength and power dispersion incoalition governments are measured by theBanzhaf index of voting power, respectivelythe standard deviation of Banzhaf indicesof coalition parties. We believe that theseare better-suited proxies than most of whathas been applied so far. Governmentstrength turns out to be insignificant.However, coalitions with equally strongpartners run significantly higher deficitsthan coalitions with one dominating party.     

Observations on Russian Business Networks

An American attorney directing a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program in Georgia since autumn 1997 describes privatization and registration of agricultural land in possession of former collective farm members. This program, incorporating experience derived from agricultural land privatization and registration elsewhere in the former USSR and designed to emphasize transparent and immediate establishment of land rights, is analyzed and compared with alternative approaches.     

Institutional Context, Cognitive Resources and Party Attachments Across Democracies

e-mail: jdh39{at}columbia.edu e-mail: gck2001{at}columbia.edu e-mail: ell2002{at}columbia.edu This paper develops and tests arguments about how national-levelsocial and institutional factors shape the propensity of individualsto form attachments to political parties. Our tests employ atwo-step estimation procedure that has attractive propertieswhen there is a binary dependent variable in the first stageand when the number of second-level units is relatively small.We find that voters are most likely to form party attachmentswhen group identities are salient and complimentary. We alsofind that institutions that assist voters in retrospectivelyevaluating parties—specifically, strong party disciplineand few parties in government—increase partisanship. Theseinstitutions matter most for those individuals with the fewestcognitive resources, measured here by education.