Creating impressions: An experimental investigation of political advertising on television

Using an experimental design, this paper addresses a few basic, but important, questions about the influence of televised political advertising. How effective are different kinds of political spots in creating impressions of a candidate among viewers? Do negative ads work better than positive ads in creating favorable impressions? Do spots that focus on issues create more favorable impressions that spots that stress the traits of a candidate? Do two ads work better than one ad in creating impressions? Can the effects of a spot be undercut by a follow-up advertisement from the opposition? This paper offers some tentative answers to these questions.

     

Participatory Budgeting in Midwestern States: Democratic Connection or Citizen Disconnection?

What participation mechanisms connect citizens and city officials? Do they produce valued outcomes? Surveys of elected officials suggest that microlevel mechanisms such as direct citizen contact are more valuable in meeting participation goals than are mechanisms focusing on macrolevel concerns. However, there is a disconnect between perceptions about value and the use of mechanisms. State‐level participation requirements and a city manager have little effect on the value of a mechanism. These findings raise some questions: why are microlevel participation mechanisms favored, why do some mechanisms have value even though respondents have little experience with them, and why is there a misalignment between participatory goals and the mechanisms used?     

Ideology,voting, and shirking

Since we first raised the issue in 1979, scholars have addressed two questions regarding ideology and congressional voting. Does ideology have an impact on such voting? Do representatives shirk by voting their own ideology rather than their constituents' interests? For the first question, it appears that there is a consensus that ideology does matter, although we present some confirming evidence for 1980. The second question has been confused; some think that ideology and shirking are identical, although they are logically separate categories. We show that even if ideological shirking exists, it is relatively unimportant. We also show that self interested (non-ideological) shirking exists. We conclude that research efforts to untangle constituents' and representatives' separate ideologies have been misguided and that further efforts to examine the determinants of constituent ideology should be pursued.     

Loyalty Oaths in Finland

Loyalty oaths are a certain type of promise. What is their moral force? Do I by taking an oath thereby bind myself with some (new) moral ties to, say, the State of Finland? When can we speak of an oath as morally binding? These questions constitute the core of the paper. First, I shall give an analysis of promises and promising in general. Secondly, I shall try to analyse the question ‘Do we have to keep our promises?’ After this I shall consider some differences between standard case promises and loyalty oaths. After this the connection of loyalty oaths to civil liberty will be brought out. Thereafter I shall give a brief presentation of the politically most relevant loyalty oaths in Finland and ask if they can be considered as having any moral force. The paper ends with a few hints on the practical consequences of this analysis.     

Strategic voting in local elections: evidence from Portugal (1979–2013)

Do voters behave strategically in local elections? Does democratic experience influence voters’ capacity to behave strategically? Is there a relation between education and voters’ capacity to anticipate the mechanical effects of electoral statutes and adapt their behaviour accordingly? Using an original data set covering the complete democratic period, this paper studies strategic voting at the local level in Portugal. Using an ecological inference approach, we contribute to a vast body of literature on strategic voting by testing whether theories developed for national contexts travel to local contexts. Our findings suggest that (1) voters consistently defect to non-viable lists to support viable lists; (2) democratic experience helps voters to learn how to maximize their utility; and (3) education is important for voters’ ability to identify a strategic setting.     

Do government sponsored marriage promotion policies place undue pressure on individual rights?

The dominance of social science research in the debate over the Bush Administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative may explain why questions regarding the proper role of government in regulating adult intimacy have received little attention. Social science research focuses on outcomes such as well-being and health. In contrast, rights-based legal theory considers whether state action undermines the rights of individuals. In this article, I intend to shift the debate over marriage promotion policy from questions of child well-being to questions of individual rights. I will ask the following questions: Do individuals have a liberty interest in making their own choices about intimate relationships, such as marriage? Do federally-financed (and frequently state-run) marriage programs compromise this liberty interest? Are there any constitutional grounds for objecting to marriage promotion policy?     

Explaining national environmental performance: approaches,evidence, and implications

Since environmental problems rose to prominence in the last third of the twentieth century, they have been a major area of policy for national governments. A large body of research has explored the explanations for different levels of environmental policy performance among countries. This article begins with a discussion of approaches to measuring national performance before reviewing and assessing four categories of explanations in the literature, which may be summarized in four questions: (1) What are the relationships between economic growth and environmental protection? (2) Do democratic regimes have advantages over more authoritarian ones in adopting effective policies and reducing harm? (3) Do such institutional characteristics as pluralism or neo-corporatism and federalism affect a nation’s ability to deal with environmental problems? (4) Are there institutional or societal capacities or relationships within or among nations that may explain policy success? By adopting a broad perspective on the literature on national environmental performance, the article is able to explore and compare the principal findings of these categories of research and assess the relationships among them.     

Surrogate Versus Direct Measures of Political Culture: Explaining Participation and Policy Attitudes in Illinois

To date, there has been little persuasive validation of Elazar'sconcept of political subcultures as it applies to mass publics.This study represents an attempt to establish an agenda forfuture research utilizing this popular formulation of the relationshipbetween the citizen and government. A statewide sample of 805residents of Illinois was given agree-disagree statements representingElazar's individualistic, moralistic, and traditionalistic subcultures.The data are used to explore three basic research questions:Do individuals discriminate themselves along the political subculturedimensions suggested by Elazar? Can region of residence, religion,or ethnicity be used as surrogates for individual level politicalculture? And, can political culture, measured directly at theindividual level, add significant independent explanation ofpolitical behavior and opinions beyond that of socioeconomiccharacteristics?     

Opus Dei and Mexico: Civil but Sinister?

Are voluntary organizations an essential ingredient of democratization, and if so, does that include the vast number of voluntary organizations, such as the Opus Dei, which appear to be authoritarian in their internal affairs? Do groups whose goals and internal structure have little relationship to the nurturing of democracy nevertheless contribute to a democratic culture? Discussing such questions is one of the main burdens of this article, which on that respect is a contribution to the now‐growing volume of literature about political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The problems presented by such groups as Opus Dei are an illustrative case in weighing the contributions of Latin American volunteerism to democratization. The Catholic Church has had a more than passing interest in which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) would be successful in Mexico and which would not. It has encouraged some NGOs—Opus Dei being, we think, a strong case in point.     

Taiwan’s investment policy in mainland China a domestic perspective

The interaction of politics and economics has complicated Taiwan’s investment in mainland China. Do we need to put some pressure on Taiwan’s investors and ask them to follow the “Jie Je Yong Ren” policy? Or can we just let them go, according to the principle of market liberalization? It is indeed very difficult to find an absolute solution. Again, it is also not easy to identify which perspective, state or market, is right or wrong. Although the conflictual situation between the government and the entrepreneurs will continue in the future, at least some of the myths relevant to this political and economic interaction across the Strait must be cleared up. Hopefully, this paper might provide some implications for both political decision-makers and enterpreneurs in Taiwan.     

Hard Lessons from Hard Times: Reconsidering and Reorienting the “Managing Decline” Literature

Does the public administration research from the late 1970s and 1980s on managing decline contain useful lessons for today's Great Recession? Do these studies serve our current research needs? Why has decline continued to be a major focus of research in generic management, but not in public administration? The answers to these questions give some clues as to a possible new, revitalized research agenda for our field. Whereas public administration often viewed organizational decline as a self‐contained set of problems requiring remedial action, generic management and sociology research on decline tended to view the topic as part of organizational phases and life cycles, linking decline to growth, stability, and change. Viewing decline as part of the organizational life cycle encourages researchers to take a longer view of organizations and their management, and thus its orientation is more strategic than reactive. Three areas of decline studies are identified as relevant irrespective of sector: (1) implications of decline for human resources management, (2) effects of decline on organization structure and design, (3) the relation of strategy and decline.     

Agency Leaders, Gendered Institutions, and Representative Bureaucracy

This study examines three central questions: Do women state agency heads establish priorities that advance women's interests more frequently than men agency heads? Among state agency heads with women‐related top priorities, are there systematic differences between women and men in the influences on their priority choices? Do the organizational and political contexts in which agency leaders work explain variation in policy priorities? Analysis of data from a national survey of women and men department heads reveals that working in a redistributive agency affects whether a leader pursues a women‐centered policy agenda, regardless of the leader's gender, other personal characteristics, or reported influences on priority choice. The authors conclude that the way representative bureaucracy actually plays out can be more fully understood if the tenets of social science theory on gendered institutions are incorporated into analyses of how representative bureaucracy works.     

International public management network symposium on administrative philosophies and management practice

Do administrative philosophies, however defined, lead or trail change in public sector organizations? How may we define administrative philosophy and is useful to distinguish between philosophy, doctrine and justification? To what extent does academic research and theory influence administrative practice? Do academics learn most of what they theorize about from practitioners? These and other questions are addressed in this first IPMN electronic symposium.     

Does party rhetoric affect voter perceptions of party positions?

Do voters listen to parties? Do they pay attention to and understand parties' policy messages? We explore these questions with two studies. First, we assembled the most comprehensive cross-national dataset on media coverage of parties' rhetoric during election campaigns and show that parties’ media messages about their left-right positions significantly affect voter perceptions of these positions. We corroborate the cross-national results with panel data from the UK that allow us to more rigorously identify the party rhetoric effect and to show that it extends beyond the left-right super issue: party messages affect voter perceptions also on specific issues, such as income redistribution and European integration. Taken together, these findings suggest that voters indeed listen to parties and understand their policy messages.     

World History in 60 Seconds: How Bank Imperial Re-Edited Russian Binary Logic

Contemporary Russian culture's biggest problem is not westernisation, popification or rampant social impoverishment, but the stubborn aversion to counting past three. There is some sort of sick fascination with binary oppositions. Ever since the destruction of pagan worship 1000 years ago, the Holy dialectical triad has damned Russian culture. All attempts at modernisation are stifled by grandiose plans based on binary models of cultural dynamism that, after an initial expulsion of energy, eventually stagnate and spoil more than they transform. Moreover, there is little opportunity for multiple modes of analysis since most studies privilege the same destructive dialectics that they seek to examine. Everything is locked into a violent oppositional mentality that suffocates change, and only leads to new and improved methods of oppression and social degradation. All of Russia's other problems stem from this mathematical myopia. Within the relatively new field of Kulturology (Russian Cultural Studies) and the relatively forgotten field of Russian Philosophy (not philosophy in Russia) there have been few attempts to explore moments of interconnection. Subsequently, Kulturology is presented as a natural progression of a dialectical continuum that is necessarily oppositional. There is a common assumption that scholars study texts by using specific critical strategies within disciplinary limits and not the other way round. That is, they do not explore or question their discipline through the study of tactical texts. The intention of this paper is not to contrast Kulturology to Russian Philosophy and Cultural Studies so as to come up with a more refined product, but to examine the relationship between their central epistemological concerns. Rather than applying them either singularly or coextensively in order to analyse a particular text, I will attempt to consider Kulturology and Russian Philosophy through the text of a contemporary Russian-made advertising campaign. Curiously, the commercial text and the critical disciplines share key discursive concerns that point to a shared contemporary cognitive logic. Their arithmetical articulation of the cognitive logic of the dynamics of Russian culture, structures of interpretation and the construction of cultural history are the excessive focus of this paper.     

Defending a cosmopolitanism without illusions. Reply to my critics

This essay engages with several critiques of my project a ‘cosmopolitanism without illusions.’ Who is the subject of rights? What are the objects of rights? Is there a distinction between human and moral rights? Furthermore, what is prior in this cosmopolitan account: democracy or human rights? Do democratic iterations exhaust the meaning of principles of rights? Finally, does the ‘scarf affair’ really signify the return of ‘political theology’ or have not such disputes always accompanied secularization and modernity? I argue that moral rights comprise more than human rights and that non-human beings such as animals can have moral rights claims against us. Democratic iterations and rights complement one another; neither is prior and that although debates about religion and secularization have been endemic to modernity, the return of references to Carl Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ is rather new.     

On Setting Priorities among Human Rights

Should conflicts among human rights be dealt with by including general principles for priority setting at some prominent place in the practice of human rights? This essay argues that neither setting prominent and principled priorities nor a case-by-case approach are likely to be defensible as general solutions. The main reasons concern how best to realize all human rights for all. Conflicts among human rights are more defensibly addressed (1) by checking whether the conflict has been correctly diagnosed: Do human rights as a whole get due priority? Have feasibility considerations inherent in human rights been considered, and the possibility of bringing in additional dutybearers? (2) If a conflict among human rights is genuine, formal principles for priority setting are of some help. Sometimes, it is clear that these should be “upgraded” to substantive principles and sometimes that they should not. Many cases, however, are as yet unclear and will need further investigation.     

Markets vs. polls as election predictors: An historical assessment

Prediction markets have drawn considerable attention in recent years as a tool for forecasting elections. But how accurate are they? Do they outperform the polls, as some scholars argue? Do prices in election markets carry information beyond the horserace in the latest polls? This paper assesses the accuracy of US presidential election betting markets in years before and after opinion polling was introduced. Our results are provocative. First, we find that market prices are far better predictors in the period without polls than when polls were available. Second, we find that market prices of the pre-poll era predicted elections almost on par with polls following the introduction of scientific polling. Finally, when we have both market prices and polls, prices add nothing to election prediction beyond polls. To be sure, early election markets were (surprisingly) good at extracting campaign information without scientific polling to guide them. For more recent markets, candidate prices largely follow the polls.     

Does the Ideological Proximity Between Candidates and Voters Affect Voting in U.S. House Elections?

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates’ ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes “as if” based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. The modest degree of candidate-centered spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.     

A dynamic test of the marginality hypothesis

The marginality hypothesis is an attempt to relate the voting margins of members of Congress to their subsequent legislative behavior. A major corollary of the hypothesis is that members of Congress with small victory margins will be more responsive to constituents than those with large victory margins. This has been assumed to mean that electorally secure representatives can afford to be more loyal to their congressional parties, since they have less cause to worry about their chances for reelection. Previous empirical studies have produced mixed results. We ask the question in a different way: Do changes in marginality affect party voting within Congress? If so, major shifts in the electorate potentially can have a fundamental impact on the behavior of Congress itself. We find that this is not true. Electoral margin is simply not related to party loyalty.