Adult roles and the gender gap in political knowledge: a comparative study

The unusual size and persistence of the gender gap in political knowledge is perplexing in comparison to other dimensions of politics. Building on situational explanations of political engagement, this article claims that women’s and men’s specific adult roles lead to an enlargement of the gender gap in knowledge. The present study analyses men and women’s levels of political knowledge at different life stages by means of two unique datasets specifically collected to measure what people know about politics. Findings show that adult roles provide more opportunities for men to gain political knowledge than for women. Furthermore, the comparison of levels of political knowledge in two such dissimilar countries as Finland and Spain suggests that while gender equality policies are successful in tearing down some of the obstacles that hinder women’s contact with the political world, they are still insufficient to completely bridge the gender gap in political knowledge during adulthood.     

The dynamic political economy of support for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election campaign

In recent years, students of voting behavior have become increasingly interested in valence politics models of electoral choice. These models share the core assumption that key issues in electoral politicds typically are ones upon which there is a widespread public consensus on the goals of public policy. The present paper uses latent curve modeling procedures and data from a six-wave national panel survey of the American electorate to investigate the dynamic effects of voters’ concerns with the worsening economy—a valence issue par excellence—in the skein of causal forces at work in the 2008 presidential election campaign. As the campaign developed, the economy became the dominant issue. Although the massively negative public reaction to increasingly perilous economic conditions was not the only factor at work in 2008, dynamic multivariate analyses show that mounting worries about the economy played an important role in fueling Barack Obama’s successful run for the presidency.     

The influence of state-level economic conditions on the 1992 U.S. presidential election

Evidence is found that state-level economic conditions played a significant role in the defeat of George Bush in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. Evidence is also found which indicates that the entrance of Ross Perot into the race as an independent candidate was not instrumental in the Bush loss.     

Political Marketing Research in the 2000 U.S. Election

Abstract

It is not news that polls and other forms of marketing research are regularly employed to craft political strategy. What is new is that the 2000 U.S. election represented a turning point where political marketing research seems to take center stage. The print and broadcast media employed polls and other forms of research at levels far beyond anything ever seen before. At times, it appeared as if almost as much attention was being given to polls as was being given to the political candidates and the issues. This was clearly a new and important posturing of the role of political marketing research. With this as a backdrop, the current article compares polls and other forms of political research-focusing on what went wrong and what was right in terms of the use of polls, focus groups and Internet research during the 2000 U.S. election. The article ends with the presentation of some exploratory research that examines insights about respondents' opinions regarding the impact of political polls.     

From voter ID to party ID: How political parties affect perceptions of election fraud in the U.S.

This paper uses a survey experiment to assess what individuals understand about election fraud and under what circumstances they see it as a problem. I argue that political parties are central to answering both these questions. Results from the 2011 CCES survey suggest respondents are able to differentiate between the relative incentives of Democrats and Republicans where fraud tactics are concerned, but whether voters see these tactics as problematic is heavily influenced by partisan bias. The results show little support for the notion that partisan ideology drives fraud assessments, and suggest support for the idea that individual concerns for fraud are shaped a desire for their preferred candidate to win. These results offer insights that might be applied more broadly to questions of perceptions of electoral integrity and procedural fairness in democracies.     

Bridging the enduring gender gap in political interest in Europe: The relevance of promoting gender equality

Notwithstanding the improvement in gender equality in political power and resources in European democracies, this study shows that, on average, declared interest in politics is 16 per cent lower for women than for men in Europe. This gap remains even after controlling for differences in men's and women's educational attainment, material and cognitive resources. Drawing on the newly developed European Institute for Gender Equality's (EIGE) Gender Equality Index (GEI) and on the European Social Survey (ESS) fifth wave, we show that promoting gender equality contributes towards narrowing the magnitude of the differences in political interest between men and women. However, this effect appears to be conditioned by the age of citizens. More specifically, findings show that in Europe gender‐friendly policies contribute to bridging the gender gap in political engagement only during adulthood, suggesting that childhood socialisation is more strongly affected by traditional family values than by policies promoting gender equality. In contrast, feminising social citizenship does make a difference by reducing the situational disadvantages traditionally faced by women within the family and in society for middle‐aged people and older.     

Public opinion during a presidential campaign: Distinguishing the effects of environmental evolution and attitude change

This paper develops a spatial model which distinguishes between different sources of temporal variability in public opinion over the course of an election campaign. Candidates and citizens are shown as points within a space. The candidate points are fixed, but their relative positions can change as a result of change over time in the dimension weights. If this occurs, it represents environmental evolution. The individual citizens' points also can move within the space, independently of the external environment. To the extent this occurs, it represents attitude change. The model is tested with data from the CPS 1980 National Election Study. The empirical results show that much of the variability in public evaluations of the candidates is due to evolutionary changes in the electoral environment, rather than individual-level attitude changes. Furthermore, that attitudinal change which does occur is strongly delimited by factors like partisan strength, interest in the campaign, and political participation.     

Political Socialization in Context: The Effect of Political Competition on Youth Voter Turnout

Adolescence is an important time for political development. Researchers have concentrated on the family as the sole socializing agent of youths; however, as Campbell, Gimpel, and others have shown, political contexts also matter for young citizens. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, the Record of American Democracy, and election outcomes data, I find that adolescents who resided in politically competitive locales or states have higher turnout years later compared to those who lived in uncompetitive contexts. These effects are not mediated by the home political environment and act through political socialization. This research adds to a growing literature on the influence of political contexts on political behavior and is the first to explore how political competition during adolescence influences voter turnout in young adulthood.

The impact of the U.S. war on terrorism upon U.S.-China relations

Using a framework of geopolitical analysis. Oliver Lee argues that the fundamental geopolitical relationships between the United States and China, namely the relationship between the world’s strongest naval and air power and the world’s strongest land power, would not be upset even after the American military presence in central Asia since September 11, 2001. The relationship would remain essentially unaltered because — American initiation of the use of nuclear weapons against China being ruled out for fear of Chinese retaliation — China would be able to withstand any U.S. military offensive conducted with conventional land, sea, and air forces, regardless of whether the U.S. possesses permanent air bases in Central Asia or not, and regardless of how many troops it may station on them. His teaching and research interests include domestic and foreign policies of China and power in America and U.S. foreign policy.     

The house size effect and the referendum paradox in U.S. presidential elections

Barthélémy et al. (2014), extending the work of Neubauer and Zeitlin (2003), show that some U.S. presidential elections are subject to a ‘House size effect’ in that the winner of the election, i.e., the candidate who wins a majority of electoral votes, depends on the size of the House of Representatives. The conditions for the effect relate to the number of ‘Senate’ versus ‘House’ electoral votes won by each candidate, but the relationship is not straightforward due to ‘locally chaotic’ effects in the apportionment of House seats among the states as House size changes. Clearly a Presidential election that is subject to the House size effect exhibits the referendum paradox, i.e., the electoral vote winner is the popular vote loser, for some House sizes but not for others.     

The impact of campaign expenditures on political competition in the French legislative elections of 1993

We use regression analysis to estimate the effect that campaign money had on the votes of challengers and incumbents in the 1993 elections to the French legislative assembly. Incumbent candidates can at best expect to win 1.01% of the popular vote for each extra franc they spend per registered voter in their district. Challengers can expect to win at least twice as much as this. Simulations show that if campaign spending ceilings were halved, incumbents would have gained an extra ten percent of the popular vote over their closest challenging rivals. The regression analysis also suggests that voters react negatively to candidates who rely heavily on their own money for their outlays and reward candidates who rely on contributions from private individuals. These results suggest that campaign spending ceilings may inhibit political competition, and that voters may resist a candidate who relies on narrow sources of funding.     

Transnational absentee voting in the 2006 Mexican presidential election: The roots of participation

In many of the major migrant-sending countries of the developing world, governments have extended political rights to expatriates, often including the right to vote via absentee ballot. Little is known about the factors that shape transnational electoral participation, however. Using official records provided by the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute, we model the incidence of expatriate ballot solicitations prior to the 2006 presidential election in Mexico. Based on a series of event count regression analyses conducted at the level of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, we find that transnational involvement in the election depended not only on socioeconomic factors but also on the concentration of Mexican civic associations within the local community, the presence of Spanish-language media, and distance from the Mexican border. This suggests that the roots of immigrant transnational participation include factors familiar to social scientists as well as dynamics uniquely relevant to immigrant communities.     

The gender gap in populist radical-right voting: examining the demand side in Western and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

In most countries, men are more likely to vote for parties of the populist radical right (PRR) than women. The authors argue here that there are two mechanisms that might potentially explain this gender gap: mediation (women's attitudes and characteristics differ from men's in ways that explain the PRR vote) and moderation (women vote for different reasons than men). They apply these two mechanisms to general theories of support for PRR parties—the socio-structural model, the discontent model, and the policy vote model—and test these on a large sample of voters in seventeen Western and Eastern European countries. The study shows that the gender gap is produced by a combination of moderation and mediation. Socio-structural differences between men and women exist, but the extent to which they explain the gender gap is limited, and primarily restricted to post-Communist countries. Furthermore, women generally do not differ from men in their level of nativism, authoritarianism or discontent with democracy. Among women, however, these attitudes are less strongly related to a radical-right vote. This suggests that men consider the issues of the radical right to be more salient, but also that these parties deter women for reasons other than the content of their political programme. While the existing research has focused almost exclusively on mediation, we show that moderation and mediation contribute almost equally to the gender gap.     

Gender quotas,candidate background and the election of women: A paradox of gender quotas in open-list proportional representation systems

We study the effects of mandatory (legislated) gender quotas in Poland, a country utilising an open-list proportional representation electoral system. We use a unique data set comprising multiple characteristics of all candidates running in two consecutive elections to the lower chamber of the Polish parliament (the Sejm). The first of them (held in 2007) was the last pre-quota election and the second (held in 2011) the first post-quota one. We show that quotas have an inherently paradoxical nature: they cause a substantial increase in the number of female candidates but the increase is accompanied by a sharp decline in women's electoral performance. This regularity holds even if we account for multiple indicators of candidate background, including previous political experience.     

Political Disagreement in Context: The Conditional Effect of Neighborhood Context, Disagreement and Political Talk on Electoral Participation

Despite scholarly interest in determining how exposure to disagreeable political ideas influences political participation, existing research supports few firm conclusions. This paper argues that these varied findings stem from an implicit model of contextual influence that fails to account for the indirect effect of aggregate social contexts. A model of contextual influence is outlined which implies that the neighborhood partisan context moderates the effect of political disagreement in social networks on campaign participation. The evidence shows that network disagreement demobilizes people who are the political minority in their neighborhood, but has no influence on people in the majority. When viewed together, these findings indicate that a person’s relationship to the broader political environment sets distinctive network processes in motion.

The State of U.S. Federalism, 2000-2001: Continuity in Crisis

Despite the 2000 presidential-election crisis, basic continuityprevailed in American federalism, including survival of theelectoral college and furtherance of the more recent shift offederal policymaking from places to persons during today's eraof coercive or regulatory federalism. The year revealed theenduring salience of political parties and the prominent roleof interest groups in the politics of federalism, as well asthe ways in which the federal system shapes, and is shaped by,policy debates. The U.S. Supreme Court continued its state-friendlydecision-making while Congress continued to preempt state authority,attach new conditions to federal aid, federalize criminal law,and nationalize power even while giving state and local governmentsmore administrative discretion. The year also illustrated thedeclining impact of federal aid on state-local revenues comparedto the increasing fiscal impact of the federal government'ssubstantive, monetary, and fiscal policies.     

The tragedy of the political commons: Evidence from U.S. Senate roll call votes on environmental legislation

When the costs of regulation are borne by individuals outside of their political jurisdiction, an elected politician arguably will vote in favor of socially costly regulations because from his/her narrow perspective even small marginal benefits outweigh zero marginal costs. Our empirical analysis of the environmental voting records of U.S. Senators from 1991 to 2002 reveals a pronounced tendency for Senators to vote against (in favor of) environmental bills that impose costs in their (other) states. The straightforward implication is that elected politicians overgraze the regulatory pasture.     

False advertising and experience goods: the case of political services in the U.S. senate

This study uses the voter-shopping construct to analyze signaling of moderateness in the U.S. Senate. We compare legislator-provided signals (advertising)—such as membership in the U.S. Senate’s Centrist Coalition—with actual voting histories in order to characterize these types of advertising cues as sincere or insincere. Following recent research indicating that moderate legislators receive greater financial support, we test whether or not Political Action Committees (PACs) are willing to support financially those who send false signals of moderateness. Our results show that the mean level of real PAC contributions garnered by non-moderate Democrats who send false signals exceeds that of the non-moderate Democrats who do not do so by $182,078. This figure is about 74% of mean level of real PAC contributions for those non-moderate Democrats who do not send false signals.     

Strengthening the Political Safeguards of Federalism: The Fate of Recent Federalism Legislation in the U.S. Congress

Although a number of measures have been proposed during thepast decade to require the U. S. Congress to take more accountof state and local interests, whether in regard to mandates,preemptions, regulations, or grants-in-aid, the only major successhas been passage of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995(UMRA). This article examines the fate of the dozen bills thatprogressed far enough to be the subject of a committee hearingor receive a vote in the House or Senate. Only a few of thesemeasures, most of them rather modest in scope, were enacted,while the most significant measures were rejected, largely becausestate and local governments have experienced a number of difficultiesin reproducing the conditions that were present for the passageof UMRA. Health, labor, and environmental groups were able toblock a number of these bills. Business groups occasionallyparted company with state and local governments and worked todefeat federalism legislation. Finally, state and local governmentgroups have not always been united in support of these measures.     

The social logic of political choice: Picking a political party in the context of immediate social circles

The Social Logic of Politics places social learning at the center of political choice. People develop their political preferences, knowledge, values, perceptions of ability, and decisions about political behavior in interactions with others, usually members of their social circles. Political attitudes and goals are not derivatives of exogenous economic preferences. They are not the results of careful calculations, in which optimization of personal needs guides the mode of reasoning. This theoretical stance draws sustenance from recent work across the social science, even as it harkens back to established, if neglected principles of political analysis. My thanks to Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck for his encouragement and for the critical comments of several anonymous referees and to Josip Dasović and Jennifer Fitzgerald, my co-authors of Partisan Families: the Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (Zuckerman et al. 2007). Material from that book appears in this essay.