Gender,Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Finance

Political Behavior - Campaign finance research has given greater attention to race and gender, but, due to data limitations, only separately. Using new data on the ethnoracial and gender...     

Correction to: Gender,Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Finance

Political Behavior - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09693-y     

Value Conflict and Policy Change

The analysis of policy change has produced a number of contrasting theoretical approaches, each offering a lens through which to view policy phenomena. This article suggests that the existing menu of approaches for understanding change can be usefully complemented by an understanding of the role played by value conflict. Using institutionalist analysis, I argue that the need to make value‐choices in a nondisruptive way shapes large areas of government activity, particularly in Westminster systems, and explains many observed patterns of stability and change. Building on work by Thacher and Rein, I describe and characterize six types of response to value conflict, giving examples of the role and implications of each. It is not claimed that all policy change can be understood in this way—simply that some types of change reflect the value‐based nature of public policy itself, and the fact that political and bureaucratic systems must evolve mechanisms for dealing simultaneously with thousands of competing and conflicting policy values.     

失势的精英及其反抗--戊戌前后湖南新旧之争的政治学分析

本文论述了戊戌变法前后湖南维新运动中精英集团的分裂以及由此衍生的社会冲突状况.湖南维新运动是一个原本富有共识的官绅集团在民族危机面前自新和自救的努力.引起这个官绅集团分裂的直接原因是伴随着省政要员的更换和一批文化新锐的到来而出现的政治权力的重新分配,更深层的原因则是维新运动的急进尤其是科举改革的启动导致了文化权力以及与之相伴生的社会政治权力的急剧倾斜.在这个过程中被侵犯和面临被淘汰的旧精英于是联合起来,利用意识形态工具和各种实际措施对维新事业展开猛烈攻击.这个事例通常被用来说明湖南地域文化的特性,但从政治学的角度看,它呈现出更具普遍意义的特征.     

Resources, Group Conflict and Symbols: Explaining Anti-Immigration Hostility in Britain

This article analyses the causes of variation in attitudes to immigration policy in the UK. The key theoretical approaches emphasised are: the role of self-interest; group conflict over resources; and group conflict over important symbols of Britishness. The connection between perceptions of immigration and crime is also investigated. Based on the 2003 British Social Attitudes Survey, the findings indicate that self-interest has very little bearing on opposition to immigration and that British citizens instead appear to be most concerned with threats to ingroup resources posed by immigration, threats to the shared customs and traditions of British society (particularly those posed by Muslims) and – to a lesser extent – the potential for increased crime that may result from immigration.     

Educating the Least Informed: Group Endorsements in a Grassroots Campaign

Theories of low-information rationality claim that uninformed voters can compensate for their lack of political knowledge by employing heuristics, such as interest group endorsements, to make voting decisions as if they were fully informed. Critics of low-information rationality contend that politically unaware voters are unlikely to use group endorsements effectively as a heuristic since they are unlikely to know the political relevance of interest groups. We address this debate by entertaining the possibility that contextual information coupled with a source cue may enhance the effectiveness of group endorsements as a heuristic. We test competing expectations with a field experiment conducted during the 2006 election in two highly competitive Pennsylvania statehouse races where a well-known liberal interest group endorsed Democratic candidates and canvassed both core supporters and Republicans believed to be likeminded. Our results reveal that Republicans used the endorsement as a negative voting cue and that the group's endorsement helped some Republicans compensate for their lack of awareness about politics.     

Helping Friends or Influencing Foes: Electoral and Policy Effects of Campaign Finance Contributions

Campaign finance contributions may influence policy by affecting elections or influencing the choices of politicians once in office. To study the trade‐offs between these two paths to influence, we use a game in which contributions may affect electoral outcomes and signal policy‐relevant information to politicians. In the model, a campaign donor and two politicians each possess private information correlated with a policy‐relevant state of the world. The donor may allocate his or her budget to either an ally candidate who has relatively similar preferences or a moderate candidate whose preferences are relatively divergent from the donor's preferred policy. Contributions that increase the likelihood of the moderate being elected can signal good news about the donor's preferred policy and influence the moderate's policy choice. However, when the electoral effect of contributions is too small to demand sufficiently high costs to deter imitation by groups with negative information, this informational effect breaks down.     

Group Formation and Political Conflict: Instrumental and Expressive Approaches

We construct models of the endogenous formation of politicalgroups designed to capture some of the key features ofpolitical and social conflict. We draw on the `citizencandidate' approach and consider both instrumental andexpressive approaches to understanding group formation andconflict between groups. We argue that the inclusion ofexpressive elements into the analysis of political groupsprovides both new insights and a better fit with certainaspects of the realities of political conflict.     

The Media, The Campaign, and The Message

This article examines the 1996 press releases issued by Republican presidential nominee candidates during the invisible primary and the subsequent stories generated by these press releases in newspapers. We systematically examine how campaigns structure their messages, which messages are transmitted by the press to the voting public, and what factors influence the transmission of the campaign's message. We find that campaign organizations disseminate a variety of messages to the media. Our analysis demonstrates that national media organizations are most receptive to informative (logistical) messages disseminated by candidates who are at the head of the field and most hostile to substantive (issue-oriented) messages regardless of their campaign of origin. By contrast, the state press is most open to substantive messages issued by lower-tier candidates. It appears from our results that the media, more than the campaign, bear the responsibility for the emphasis on the horse race.     

Sanctions, Signals, and Militarized Conflict

Economic sanctions are frequently used as a tool of foreign policy, described by some as falling between diplomacy and military force. An important question regarding the use of sanctions is whether they can function as an alternative to military force by demonstrating the sender's resolve and making military force unnecessary, or if their use tends to result in an increased probability that military force will be used. Based on a theory of sanctions as costly signals, the authors develop and test hypotheses regarding the relationship between sanctions and military force. The results show that after a sanction occurs, there is a significantly increased probability of a use of military force. Democracies, because of their propensity to tie their hands with audience costs, while at the same time facing domestic pressure to devise sanctions to be costless to the sender, are highly likely to be involved in a militarized dispute after using sanctions.     

Conflict,Cooperation, and Institutional Change on the Commons

Rational choice scholarship posits two principal theories to explain why political institutions emerge and change: cooperation theory and conflict theory. We evaluate cooperation theory and conflict theory to explain the emergence of common property institutions among a group of Maasai pastoralists in southwestern Kenya. Our empirical results show that the change to common property is best explained by conflict theory.