Registrants,Voters, and Turnout Variability Across Neighborhoods

Although political participation has received wide-ranging scholarly attention, little is known for certain about the effects of social and political context on turnout. A scattered set of analyses—well-known by both political scientists and campaign consultants—suggests that ones neighborhood has a relatively minor impact on the decision to vote. These analyses, however, typically rely upon data from a single location. Drawing on official lists of registered voters from sixteen major counties across seven states (including Florida) from the 2000 presidential election, we use geographic/mapping information and hierarchical models to obtain a more accurate picture of how neighborhood characteristics affect participation, especially among partisans. Our research shows that neighborhoods influence voting by interacting with partisan affiliation to dampen turnout among voters we might otherwise expect to participate. Most notably, we find Republican partisans in enemy territory tend to vote less than expected, even after accounting for socioeconomic status. Our findings have implications for campaign strategy, and lead us to suggest that campaign targeting efforts could be improved by an integration of aggregate- and individual-level information about voters.     

Social Development and Political Participation: Class, Organizations and Sex

The relationship between social development and political participation has been described by Nie, Powell, and Prewitt in terms of two major contentions: (1) social development leads to increases in both the relative size of the middle class and the scope of the organizational infrastructure; (2) both factors lead in turn to higher rates of political participation, but the one - socioeconomic status - is mediated by civic attitudes, while the other - organizational involvement - is not. In trying to assess these contentions in relation to Norway, the present study arrives at several interesting, but disparate, conclusions: (a) existing findings with relevance for the problem (Martinussen's Distant Democracy ) are open to reinterpretation; (b) in a highly developed corporate-pluralist state such as Norway, organizational involvement must be distinguished as to its dependent-variable and independent-variable characteristics; (c) occupational status must be problematized as a sexist indicator; (d) class characteristics are not important determinants of participation in Norway, but sex is; (e) in relation to involvement in the electoral channel, civic attitudes do not mediate class position as much as they mediate sex; and (f) in relation to involvement in the corporate (interest-group) channel, neither sex nor class are significantly mediated by attitudes. Finally, it is pointed out that the relevance of these findings for the Nie-Powell-Prewitt position is uncertain, due to the problematic operationalization of both sex and organizational involvement in the original study*.     

The (ir)relevance of unemployment for labour market policy attitudes and welfare state attitudes

Typically, associations between being unemployed and policy attitudes are explained with reference to economic self-interest considerations of the unemployed. Preferences for labour market policies (LMP) and egalitarian preferences are the prime example and the focus of this study. Its aim is to challenge this causal self-interest argument: self-interest consistent associations of unemployment with policy preferences are neither necessarily driven by self-interest nor necessarily causal. To that end, this article first confronts the self-interest argument with a broader perspective on attitudes. Given that predispositions (e.g., value orientations) are stable and influence more specific policy attitudes, it is at least questionable whether people change their policy attitudes simply because they get laid off. Second, the article derives a non-causal argument behind associations between unemployment and policy attitudes, arguing that these might be spurious associations driven by individuals’ socioeconomic background. After all, the entire socioeconomic background of a person is simultaneously related to both the risk of getting unemployed (‘selection into unemployment’) and distinct political socialisation experiences from early childhood onwards. Third, this article uses methods inspired by a counterfactual account on causality to test the non-causal claims. Analyses are carried out using the fourth wave of the European Social Survey and applying entropy balancing to control for selection bias. In only two of the 31 analysed countries do unemployment effects on egalitarian orientations remain significant after controlling for selection bias. The same holds for effects on active LMP attitudes with the exception of six countries. Attitudes towards passive LMP are to some degree an exception since effects remain in a third of the countries. Robustness checks and Bayes factor replications showing evidence for the absence of unemployment effects support the general impression from these initial analyses. After discussing this article's results and limitations, its broader implications are considered. On the one hand, the article offers a new perspective on the conceptualisation and measurement of unemployment risk. On the other hand, its theoretical argument, as well as its treatment of the resulting selection bias, can be broadly applied. Thus, this article can contribute to many other research questions regarding the (ir)relevance of individual life events for political attitudes and political behaviour.     

Reexamining Racial Attitudes: The Conditional Relationship Between Diversity and Socioeconomic Environment

Social science research notes that racial context is related to attitudes toward social issues; however, surprisingly little research has examined how the impact of racial context on attitudes is activated. The aim of this article is to examine racial context "effects" for policy preferences, but to do so within a broader perspective. This article extends the literature on racial attitudes by considering a conditional relationship between racial and ethnic context and socioeconomic context and expanding racial context to include multiple racial and ethnic groups. The findings indicate that racial and ethnic contextual effects do emerge; however, these effects are conditional on the socioeconomic context in which an individual resides. Specifically, high socioeconomic contexts and highly diverse contexts are related to higher levels of support for racial social issues; however, contexts characterized by low socioeconomic context and high racial and ethnic diversity are associated with lower levels of support for such issues .     

Ladies against women: Explaining the political participation of traditional- and modern-role females

Data from the 1980 National Election Study are used to examine how well participation theory variables and group consciousness variables account for the nonvoting political activity of traditional-role women. Of the little variance in this activity that is explained by a regression analysis among these women (.070 after adjustments for number of respondents and variables, compared to .240 among modern-role women), most is due to two participation theory variables: party identification and efficacy. However, a discriminant function analysis emphasizes two group consciousness variables (gender consciousness and religious consciousness) and only one participation theory variable (political ideology) as the main forces that distinguish active traditional-role from active modern-role women. These findings indicate the need to make clear which comparison group — other traditional-role women or politically active modern-role women — is being used in efforts to understand traditional-role women's political conduct. The findings also call for new theoretical directions about traditional-role women's nonvoting participation, because of the weak explanatory ability exhibited by all fourteen variables together.     

Testing the Relationship Between Education and Political Participation Using the 1970 British Cohort Study

According to conventional wisdom in political behavior research, education has a direct causal effect on political participation. However, a number of recent studies have questioned this established view by arguing that education is not a direct cause of political participation but only a proxy for other factors that are not directly related to the educational experience. This paper engages in a current debate regarding the application of matching techniques to assess whether there is a direct causal effect of education on political participation. It uses data from a British cohort study that follows everyone born during 1 week in the UK in 1970. The data includes a rich set of variables measuring factors through childhood and adolescence such as cognitive ability and family socioeconomic status. This data provides the opportunity to match on a number of important variables that are not included in the US datasets used by previous studies in the field. Results show that after matching there are no significant effects of education on political participation.     

Participation in local politics in Norway: Some do,some don't; some will,some won't

Using data from two national surveys conducted in 1990 and 1993, this article investigates seven modes of sociopolitical behavior and one form of potential political participation in the context of Norwegian local government. Results indicate that factors associated with alternative modes of activity vary; different types of people tend to choose different channels of involvement. The most pronounced difference is found between activities directed toward influencing public opinion and those intended to influence political decision making more directly. Whereas the former mode is more typically chosen by younger, well-educated single women living in urban areas, the latter is more characteristic of married, better educated men living in smaller municipalities. Findings are characterized by a high degree of stability over the period considered. Only in the case of voting is there a suggestion of some possible change. After decades in which socioeconomic status variables have been of little significance for voting in Norway (a situation explained by the mobilizing effects of organizations), an effect of education was found in the 1993 survey. Also noteworthy is the distribution of participation among the population: rather than being cumulative, different forms of political involvement are relatively widespread.     

Attitudes toward integration among black and white school board members: Public comparisons and etiological factors

Comparisons of school board members' attitudes toward integration (derived from nationwide surveys of black and white school board members) with public attitudes toward integration indicate that (1) elites (school board members) appeared more liberal than the public for both races; (2) this gap between elites and the public was less distinct for blacks than whites; and (3) black school board members evidenced more liberal attitudes toward integration than white school board members.Multiple regression analyses for school board members indicated that (1) race and education were the main factors determining board members' attitudes toward racial integration; (2) political participation showed a positive association with liberal attitudes toward integration; and (3) initial method of selection (elected or appointed) apparently bears no relationship to attitudes toward integration.     

Popular Attitudes toward Distributive Injustice: Beijing and Warsaw Compared

Popular reactions to the transition from centrally planned socialism to a market-based economy are explored through an examination of survey data on distributive justice and injustice attitudes in Beijing, China, in 2000, and in Warsaw, Poland, in 2001. In both capitals objective socioeconomic status characteristics of respondents have weaker and less consistent associations with distributive injustice attitudes than measures of subjective social status and self-reported trends in family standards of living. When objective and subjective respondent background characteristics are controlled for statistically, residents of democratic and enthusiastically capitalist Warsaw have stronger feelings of distributive injustice than respondents in undemocratic and only partially reformed Beijing. However, one exception to this pattern is that Beijing residents favor government redistribution to reduce income differences more than their Warsaw counterparts. Conjectures about the sources of these differences in distributive injustice attitudes are offered. Martin King Whyte is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His recent research focuses on changing family patterns in contemporary China, China’s distinctive economic development path, and popular attitudes toward distributive injustice issues. His recent publications include two edited volumes: China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations (University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies) and One Country, Two Societies? Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). Chunping Han recently completed her PhD in Sociology at Harvard, with a doctoral thesis entitled, Rural-Urban Cleavages in Perceptions of Inequality in Contemporary China.     

Public Managers' Religiosity: Impacts on Work Attitudes and Perceptions of Co-Workers

ABSTRACT

Do public managers' religious beliefs and behaviors affect their work and their work-related attitudes? Perhaps due to the sensitive nature of this question, there is almost no empirical work on the topic. Our study uses questionnaire data (n = 765) from the National Administrative Studies Project-III to test hypotheses about the impacts of U.S. public managers' religiosity, as well as their political activity, on work attitudes. Religiosity is defined by public managers' responses about attending religious services. Political behavior is defined in terms of membership in political organizations and election groups. An application of ordinary least squares regression shows that religious public managers tend to have a stronger orientation toward job security and a more favorable view of their organization and fellow employees. Public managers are no more or less oriented to security than other respondents in the sample, but they have more negative views about their organization and fellow employees. These findings do not change when obvious controls are introduced into the model.     

Community Service by High School Students: A Cure for Civic Ills?

In response to what some see as a crisis in civic attitudes and participation, there has been a reinvigorated effort to involve high school students in school-based community activities and in less formal, volunteer community service. Yet little is known about the extent of participation or its effects. Using a nationally representative sample of 9th–12th graders from 1996, we document a high participation rate but also note that many students perform service only once or twice a year and in limited capacities. Participation rates are related to certain student, family, and school characteristics; school policies are also significant, though arranging but not requiring participation may be the key. Participation appears to stimulate greater political knowledge, more political discussions with parents, enhanced participation skills, and higher political efficacy, but not more tolerance of diversity.     

The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations

Does political violence leave a lasting legacy on identities, attitudes, and behaviors? We argue that violence shapes the identities of victims and that families transmit these effects across generations. Inherited identities then impact the contemporary attitudes and behaviors of the descendants of victims. Testing these hypotheses is fraught with methodological challenges; to overcome them, we study the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 and the indiscriminate way deportees died from starvation and disease. We conducted a multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatars in 2014 and find that the descendants of individuals who suffered more intensely identify more strongly with their ethnic group, support more strongly the Crimean Tatar political leadership, hold more hostile attitudes toward Russia, and participate more in politics. But we find that victimization has no lasting effect on religious radicalization. We also provide evidence that identities are passed down from the victims of the deportation to their descendants.     

Corruption experiences and attitudes to political,interpersonal, and domestic violence

It is understood that corruption can change the incentives to engage in political violence. However, the scope for corruption to change attitudes toward the permissibility of violence has received less attention. Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory, we argue that experiences of corruption in the social environment are likely to shape individual attitudes toward violent behavior. Using Afrobarometer data, we document a statistically significant and sizable relationship between an individual's experience of paying bribes and their attitudes to political, interpersonal, and domestic violence. These relationships are evident, and not significantly different, for men and women and are robust to the inclusion of variables capturing the local incidence of corruption, local norms regarding violence, and a proxy for the local incidence of violence with the community. Corruption is associated with permissive attitudes to violence even after controlling for the perceived legitimacy of the police and courts.     

Proportional representation and attitudes about politics: results from New Zealand

PR systems often are credited with producing more equitable outcomes between political parties and encouraging wider social group representation than majoritarian systems. Theory suggests that this should instill greater trust, efficacy, and faith in the political system. We assume that citizens disadvantaged by majoritarian rules (political minorities) will have a relatively greater shift toward positive attitudes about democracy following a transition from a majoritarian system to proportional representation. We employ panel data from the 1993–1996 New Zealand Election Study (NZES) to test hypotheses about the effects of electoral system change on attitudes about governmental responsiveness, trust in government, and political efficacy. We find that there is a general shift in mass opinion toward more positive attitudes on some measures of efficacy and responsiveness. Political minorities display a greater shift toward feelings of efficacy than other voters.     

The Relationship between Genes,Psychological Traits,and Political Participation

Recent research demonstrates that a wide range of political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors can be explained in part by genetic variation. However, these studies have not yet identified the mechanisms that generate such a relationship. Some scholars have speculated that psychological traits mediate the relationship between genes and political participation, but so far there have been no empirical tests. Here we focus on the role of three psychological traits that are believed to influence political participation: cognitive ability, personal control, and extraversion. Utilizing a unique sample of more than 2,000 Swedish twin pairs, we show that a common genetic factor can explain most of the relationship between these psychological traits and acts of political participation, as well as predispositions related to participation. While our analysis is not a definitive test, our results suggest an upper bound for a proposed mediation relationship between genes, psychological traits, and political participation.     

When to Tell? : Disclosure of Concealable Group Membership,Stereotypes, and Political Evaluation

Although their group membership is normatively irrelevant to vote choice, members of politically underrepresented groups (e.g., women, nonwhites, and gays and lesbians) are often evaluated through the prism of their group memberships and related stereotypes when competing for elective office. Because membership in groups defined by gender, race, or ethnicity is easily perceptible, women and nonwhite candidates may have little control over the political effects of their group membership. Membership in groups defined by a candidate's sexual orientation is concealable, in contrast, and thus potentially gives gay and lesbian candidates some control over the impact of their homosexuality and accompanying stereotypes on voters' responses. Using an experimental design, I examine the relationships between timing of group membership disclosure, group stereotypes, candidate sex, and political responses to gay and lesbian candidates for office—taking into consideration voters' attitudes toward homosexuality and their sex.     

Threat-Inducing Violent Events Exacerbate Social Desirability Bias in Survey Responses

A key challenge in survey research is social desirability bias: respondents feel pressured to report acceptable attitudes and behaviors. Building on established findings, we argue that threat-inducing violent events are a heretofore unaccounted for driver of social desirability bias. We probe this argument by investigating whether fatal terror attacks lead respondents to overreport past electoral participation, a well-known and measurable result of social desirability bias. Using a cross-national analysis and natural and survey experiments, we show that fatal terror attacks generate turnout overreporting. This highlights that threat-inducing violent events induce social desirability, that researchers need to account for the timing of survey fieldwork vis-à-vis such events, and that some of the previously reported post-violent conflict increases in political participation may be more apparent than real.     

Politicians,Scandals, and Trust in Government

In this paper we examine the role that political scandals play in eroding regard for government and political institutions in general. We know that scandals can lower regard for individual politicians and government leaders. Yet, less is known about how scandal influences attitudes toward institutions and the political process. It has been widely assumed that such attitudes are influenced by factors that lie largely beyond the control of individual politicians. Using data from the U.S. and the U.K. we show that scandals involving legislators can have a negative influence on their constituent's attitudes toward institutions and the political process. One consequence of this finding is that, instead of looking for scapegoats in Hollywood or among the failings of voters themselves, politicians should first get their own House in order.     

Assessing Voter Registration Among Transgender and Gender Non-conforming Individuals

Although public attention to transgender (trans) politics has increased dramatically in recent years, the scholarly community still has a limited understanding of how trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) individuals participate in the political system. Trans/GNC individuals are faced with a dual reality. On one hand, they are part of a highly organized and activated group whose rights depend on political engagement; on the other hand, individuals often face barriers to political participation including a lack of proper identification and low socioeconomic status. In this paper, we explore the effects of these competing forces on trans/GNC voter registration. We use the theory of oppositional consciousness to hypothesize that being part of a political and highly mobilized population helps trans/GNC individuals overcome barriers to participation. Using data on over 5000 self-identified trans/GNC individuals from the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey we show that, though individuals are less likely to participate if they lack gender-conforming identification, on the whole trans/GNC individuals in this survey register at rates that are consistent with or higher than the general population. The evidence points to the importance of the trans political movement in activating and developing oppositional consciousness in its members. We explore the implications of these findings and what they mean for future research.

     

Risk Attitudes and Political Participation

This article contributes to existing explanations of political participation by proposing that citizens’ attitudes towards risk predict participation. I argue that people who are risk accepting participate in political life because politics offers novelty and excitement. Analyses of two independent Internet surveys establish a positive, significant relationship between risk attitudes and general political participation. The analyses also suggest that the relationship between risk attitudes and action varies with the political act: people who are more risk accepting are more likely to participate in general political acts, but they are no more or less likely to turn out in elections. Further analyses suggest that two key mechanisms—novelty seeking and excitement seeking—underlie the relationship between risk attitudes and political participation.