When presidential candidates voice party issues,does Twitter listen?

ABSTRACT

Presidential candidates often speak to their party’s issues because parties are thought to have “greater competence on handling” some issues versus others [Petrocik 1996, “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study.” American Journal of Political Science 40 (3): 825–850, 825]. The present study considers whether Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tend to use different vocal inflections when talking about their party’s issues. Using the audio from the three 2016 presidential debates, we not only find Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump seem to be more emotionally invested in their party’s issues, but they use distinct vocal patterns which suggest they “own” some issues more than others. To assess whether viewers responded more positively to these different vocal inflections, we used the valence of 428,185 live-tweets. Ultimately, we found Twitter was net-positive when the candidates raised their vocal pitch while talking about their party’s issues. This suggests nonverbal cues are an important component of issue ownership.     

When does inequality demobilize? New evidence from the American states

Income inequality has been rising throughout the industrialized world, particularly in the United States. This long been thought to depress turnout, but extant research has yielded mixed findings. Here, I argue that the inequality-turnout relationship is conditional, depending crucially on election salience. I test this by using three decades (1984–2014) of panel data from the U.S. states and by leveraging the fixed and exogenous occurrence of presidential (higher-salience) and midterm (lower-salience) elections. Overall, I find a negative and statistically significant relationship between income inequality and voter turnout in midterm election years, but a substantively small and non-significant relationship in presidential election years. I attribute this to the ability of presidential contests, relative to midterms, to counteract the demobilizing influence of high inequality, by piquing voters’ interest and activating citizens who would otherwise abstain. Overall, these findings help us to better understand of the politics of electoral participation in an era of high, and rising economic inequality.     

When does open government shut? Predicting government responses to citizen information requests

Methods for the analysis of “big data” on citizen-government interactions are necessary for theoretical assessments of bureaucratic responsiveness. Such big data methods also stand to benefit practitioners' abilities to monitor and improve these emerging transparency mechanisms. We consider supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) as a potential method for these purposes. To this end, we use sLDA to examine the Mexican government's (non)responsiveness to all public information requests filed with the federal Mexican government during the 2003–2015 period, and to identify the request topics most associated with (non)responsiveness. Substantively, our comparisons of the topics that are most highly predictive of responsiveness and nonresponsivess indicate that political sensitivity plays a large and important role in shaping official behavior in this arena. We thus conclude that sLDA provides unique advantages for, and insights into, the analysis of (i) textual records of citizen–government interactions and (ii) bureaucratic (non)responsiveness to these interactions.     

When and why does education matter? Motivation and resource effects in political efficacy

Education increases political engagement because it bolsters motivations and cognition on the one hand, and relative resources on the other. However, personality traits have recently been found to partially confound the education effect. Focusing on internal and external political efficacy allows us to disentangle the different effects of education. It is argued in this article (a) that personal dispositions confound the cognitive and motivational effect of education, which is the predominant effect of education on internal efficacy, but not resource effects which are important for external but not internal efficacy; and (b) that resource effects are context‐dependent whereas cognitive and motivational effects are not. Accordingly, the article shows that the competitive context in which individuals find themselves conditions the effect of education on external, but not on internal, efficacy.     

When Are Agenda Setters Valuable?

Why do industries donate money to legislative campaigns when roll‐call votes suggest that donors gain nothing in return? I argue that corporate donors may shape policy outcomes by influencing powerful agenda setters in the early stages of lawmaking. On the basis of a new data set of more than 45,000 individual state legislator sessions (1988–2012), I document how agenda control is deemed valuable to legislators and groups seeking influence on policy. Employing a difference‐in‐differences design, I assess the revealed price, as measured by campaign contributions, that firms are willing to pay for access to committee and party leaders and document how this price varies across industries and institutions. The results indicate that industries systematically funnel money to the legislative agenda setters by whom they are regulated, and to those endowed with important procedural powers. I document that the value of agenda‐setter positions has increased dramatically in recent years. Finally, exploiting changes in state laws, I show that relaxing contribution limits significantly benefits committee chairs and party leaders more so than it does other legislators, suggesting that agenda setters have strong incentives to obstruct restrictive campaign finance reforms.     

When does the multiple principals hypothesis hold? The politics of U.S. agency policymaking autonomy

When the bureaucracy's political principals hold different preferences for policy, does this increase the bureaucracy's policymaking autonomy? Existing theory strongly suggests “yes.” We, however, argue that this pattern will materialize only when the bureaucracy's principals are all on the same side of the political divide. (i.e., unified government). Using data gathered from the American states at two time points, we capture preference divergence by measuring the ideological distance between the bureaucracy's key political principals—legislators, governors, and courts—on the common left–right dimension. We measure policymaking autonomy through multi-faceted surveys of state agency leaders. In keeping with our argument, we demonstrate that greater preference divergence across the bureaucracy's principals is associated with increased agency policymaking autonomy under unified—but not under divided—government. The results shed new light on when, and why, the bureaucracy's political principals may provide an oversight check on the policymaking power of the modern administrative state.     

When Are Nudges Desirable? Benefit Validity When Preferences Are Not Consistently Revealed

Cost-benefit analysis, as a tool of general use in policy analysis or as a mandated analytical process in some rulemaking, provides protocols for assessing the relative efficiency of policy alternatives. However, inconsistent and apparently irrational decisions by consumers in some situations call into question the validity of inferring the values that consumers place on outcomes from their observed choices. It also opens the door for “nudges” that change the architecture of choice to promote more “rational” consumer choice. Differences between decision utility and experience utility and the willingness of consumers to pay for reductions in temptation provide conceptual bases for thinking about the efficiency of nudges. However, assessment of nudges and their role in behavioral public administration should also recognize that heterogeneous preferences can result in increases in utility for some and decreases for others. Therefore, nudges require systematic assessment like other policy instruments.     

When do autonomous banking regulators promote stability?

Can autonomous banking regulatory agencies reduce the odds that a country will suffer a crippling banking crisis? We investigate the impact that agencies charged with banking regulation and prudential supervision can have on financial stability in the banking sector. We argue that the potential benefits of autonomy are hard to realise because banking regulators face incentives to shirk in their mandate to secure banking stability. These incentives are strongest in political systems with high numbers of veto players, where the autonomy of a banking agency is difficult to undo even if the agency is derelict in promoting banking sector stability. We test an implication of this argument, namely, that the probability of bank crisis onset should diminish with the level of autonomy of the banking agency, but only in polities with low numbers of veto points. We base our analysis of this conditional hypothesis on an original dataset of 79 countries observed between 1971 and 2009 that captures the degree of autonomy of banking agencies from political principals. Our findings confirm that the impact of banking agency autonomy on the risk of bank crisis onset is conditional on the political structure in which the agency is embedded.     

When are stable rights to rents bad?

Stable, enforceable property rights over resources normally furthers economic efficiency. I argue that stable rights to government created rents and wealth transfers, by contrast, generate inefficiency. Secure rights to receive transfers increases rent-seekers' incentive to make political investments creating new transfers. I demonstrate the point using a two period rent-seeking game. Contestable transfers reduce the probability of establishing a transfer program and aggregate rent-seeking expenditures. Strengthening transfer recipients' rights increases the difficulty of eliminating a transfer program.     

Why does government produce national defense?

Economists argue that government produces national defense because it is a public good, and markets fail to produce public goods optimally. This argument has two shortcomings. First, it relies on different assumptions of individual behavior in the private and public sectors. Second, it assumes that government has a comparative advantage in the production of public goods, despite evidence to the contrary. Employing the standard assumption of self-interested behavior for both private sector and public sector individuals, government has an incentive to produce national defense because by doing so it is protecting its source of income: its tax base. Incidentally, citizens benefit from the exchange of protection for tribute because their assets are protected.     

British nationalists’ new start

The right‐extremist Front National, led by Jean Marie Le Pen, has gained significant support among the electorate. The Front's campaign is populist and it exploits the resurgence of xenophobic feeling in France, using the imagery of antisemitism to influence public opinion.     

When do voters boycott elections with participation quorums?

Public Choice - With participation quorums present in elections and referendums, supporters of the status quo have to decide whether to vote against the proposition or boycott it by abstaining...     

When Did Health Care Become a Campaign Issue?

Most people mistakenly assume that health care first became a major political issue in 1945 because President Harry S. Truman’s special address to Congress on Nov. 19 of that year marked the first time a sitting president publicly endorsed a national health-care program. But the question of whether—or to what extent—it is the responsibility of government to subsidize health care for its citizens has been around for a much longer amount of time. Now that health care has become a major focus of domestic political debate, especially in light of the impending presidential election, this article, modified from an entry in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Campaigns, Elections, & Electoral Behavior (Sage Publications), serves to inform the reader of the origins and history of health care as a campaign issue.

When do Economic Perceptions Matter for Party Approval?

Do economic perceptions influence partisan preferences or vice versa? We argue that the direction of influence between government approval and economic perceptions is conditional on the state of the economy. Under conditions of economic crisis, when economic signals are relatively unambiguous, perceptions of the economy can be expected to exogenously influence government approval but this is not found when the economy is experiencing a more typical pattern of moderate growth and economic signals are more mixed. We test these arguments using British election panel surveys covering electoral cycles of moderate economic growth (1997–2001) and dramatic and negative disruption (2005–2010). We examine the most commonly employed measures of retrospective economic perceptions and estimate a range of models using structural equations modelling. We demonstrate that when the economy is performing extremely badly economic perceptions have an exogenous effect on government approval and provide a means of electoral accountability, but this is not the case in under more normal circumstances.     

Do Voters Polarize When Radical Parties Enter Parliament?

Do voters polarize ideologically when radical views gain political legitimacy, or does the rise of radical voices merely reflect societal conflict? We argue that elite polarization as signaled by radical parties' first entrance into parliament leads to voter divergence. Immediately after the election, legitimization and backlash effects mean that voters on both ideological sides move toward the extremes. In the longer term, this polarization is solidified because of radical parties' parliamentary presence. A panel study of Dutch voters shows that the 2002 parliamentary entrance of a radical‐right party indeed led to immediate ideological polarization across the political spectrum. Estimating time‐series cross‐sectional models on Eurobarometer data from 17 countries (1973–2016) shows an additional long‐term impact of radical‐right party entry on polarization. The presence of radical voices on the right has polarizing effects, illustrating how such institutional recognition and legitimization can have a far‐reaching impact on society.     

When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus‐building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies. We find strong evidence that minority party women in the U.S. House of Representatives are better able to keep their sponsored bills alive through later stages of the legislative process than are minority party men, across the 93^rd–110^th Congresses (1973–2008). The opposite is true for majority party women, however, who counterbalance this lack of later success by introducing more legislation. Moreover, while the legislative style of minority party women has served them well consistently across the past four decades, majority party women have become less effective as Congress has become more polarized.