Informing the Electorate? How Party Cues and Policy Information Affect Public Opinion about Initiatives

Citizens in representative democracies receive party endorsements and policy information when choosing candidates or making policy decisions via the initiative process. What effects do these sources of information have on public opinion? We address this important question by conducting survey experiments where citizens express opinions about initiatives in a real‐world electoral context. We manipulate whether they receive party cues, policy information, both, or neither type of information. We find that citizens do not simply ignore policy information when they are also exposed to party cues. Rather, citizens respond by shifting their opinions away from their party's positions when policy information provides a compelling reason for doing so. These results challenge the prominent claim in public opinion research that citizens blindly follow their party when also exposed to policy information. They also suggest that efforts to inform the electorate can influence opinions, provided that citizens actually receive the information being disseminated.     

Partnership as a new strategy in mental health policy: the case of Québec

The notion of partnership is increasingly adopted as a sine qua non for the successful resolution of strategic problems in the field of human services. In this paper, I examine Québec's recent mental health policy and its operational definition of the concept. I then suggest some of the roots and reasons behind this province's adoption of le partenariat as the basis for policy. I suggest that it is a response to four key strategic problems: (1) the exhaustion of resources and allocation of losses; (2) the loss of faith in government and the consequent need to redefine the role of the state; (3) the loss of faith in professional knowledge and the increasingly forceful voice of alternative and "psychiatric survivor" groups; (4) the problem of overload in pluralist and competitive democracy and, related to this, the ubiquitous search for consensus and frictionless solutions. I conclude that in adopting the language of partnership, policymakers in Québec and elsewhere are being seduced by the possibilities of neocorporatist ideas applied to the management of human services.     

The likelihood of social choice violations in rank sum scoring: algorithms and evidence from NCAA cross country running

Recent contributions have used combinatorial algorithms to determine the likelihood of particular social choice violations in rank sum scoring. Given the broad importance of rank sum scoring (e.g., in non-parametric statistical testing, sporting competition, and mathematical competition), it is important to establish the level of ambiguity generated by this aggregation rule. Combinatorial likelihoods are naïve, however, in that they assume each possible outcome sequence for an event to be equally likely. We develop a computational algorithm to extend upon previous combinatorial results as to the likelihood of a violation of transitivity or independence in rank sum scoring. We use a similar computational scoring approach to analyze the empirically-observed likelihood of each such violation across fourteen NCAA Cross Country Championships. Within the data, rank sum scoring fails to specify a robust winning team (i.e., one that also rank sum wins against each possible subset of opponents) in 4 of 14 cases. Overall, we find that empirical likelihoods of social choice violations are consistently (significantly) overestimated by combinatorial expectations. In the NCAA data, we find correlated ability (quality) levels within team (group) and discuss this as a cause of lower empirical likelihoods. Combinatorial analysis proves reliable in predicting the order of empirical likelihoods across violation type and event setting.     

UN sanctions burden sharing: Article 50 of the UN charter and assistance to third states

abstract

This article proposes the establishment by the UN Security Council of a system of mutual support for third states whose economies have been adversely affected as a result of UN non‐military sanctions. This system consists of several components: (1) creating new markets for the sale of goods and services of third states; (2) crafting of a logical UN sanctions costs methodology; (3) bringing into UN Security Council for a those bilateral and regional efforts involving cases of UN sanctions compensation; (4) devising norms and procedures for acquiring and pooling of the requisite funds out of which states’ claims for damages attributable to UN sanctions might be satisfied; and (5) establishing a mechanism for the adjudication of such claims. While many obstacles admittedly exist to creating such a system of mutual support, the article argues that effective UN sanctions burden sharing is nevertheless important to international relations theory and practice, since UN sanctions appear to be increasing in frequency as they undergird many of the Security Council's contemporary enforcement actions.     

Racial or Spatial Voting? The Effects of Candidate Ethnicity and Ethnic Group Endorsements in Local Elections

With the growth of Latino and Asian American populations, candidates frequently must appeal to diverse electorates. Strategies for doing so include emphasizing candidates’ racial/ethnic identity and securing endorsements from racial/ethnic groups. While many scholars focus on candidates’ racial/ethnic attributes, ethnic group endorsements are understudied. Whether such endorsements induce voters to choose ideologically similar candidates (spatial voting), or choose based on race/ethnicity (racial voting) is unclear. We address this question by examining elections in multiethnic local settings. Using original surveys and exit polls, we create comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology, and examine how race/ethnicity and ideology affect voters’ choices. We also embed experiments that manipulate ethnic group endorsements. We find that ideology influences voters’ choices, but that ethnic group endorsements weaken spatial voting. The latter effect among whites is driven by racial/ethnic stereotypes. These reactions explain why some candidates seek such endorsements and why others might prefer to avoid them.     

Making Citizens Smart: When do Institutions Improve Unsophisticated Citizens’ Decisions?

Many scholars lament citizens’ lack of political sophistication, while others emphasize that information shortcuts can substitute for sophistication and help citizens with their political choices. In this paper, I use experiments to assess whether and under what conditions institutions can substitute for sophistication and enable even unsophisticated citizens to make informed decisions. The results of my experiments demonstrate that institutions, such as a penalty for lying or a threat of verification, can help both sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens to make more informed decisions. Further, my results suggest that institutions may, under certain conditions, level the playing field between sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens.

‘Living with culture’: creative citizenship practices in Toronto

This paper addresses the contemporary creativity ethos through the lens of citizenship. The paper builds upon governmentality scholarship to examine how creativity and cultural participation are being recast as moral duties of active citizenship. It notes the development of governmental projects that seek to optimize the creative capacities of individuals toward a variety of ends. The paper develops these observations through an examination of cultural planning practices in Toronto. It notes how the city's cultural policies are viewed in increasingly therapeutic terms as technologies of creative citizenship. Emphasis is placed on the proliferation of participatory arts festivals and arts-based community development projects that enlist urban denizens into creative citizenship practices. The paper then explores a paradox at the centre of this emergent regime of creative citizenship. It describes how the creative citizen is construed in cultural planning practice as a heroic agent of innovation and civic renewal, and, at the same time, as an object of continual monitoring, assessment and risk-management.