What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior

How does the context in which a person lives affect his or her political behavior? I exploit an event in which demographic context was exogenously changed, leading to a significant change in voters' behavior and demonstrating that voters react strongly to changes in an outgroup population. Between 2000 and 2004, the reconstruction of public housing in Chicago caused the displacement of over 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. After the removal of their African American neighbors, the white voters' turnout dropped by over 10 percentage points. Consistent with psychological theories of racial threat, their change in behavior was a function of the size and proximity of the outgroup population. Proximity was also related to increased voting for conservative candidates. These findings strongly suggest that racial threat occurs because of attitude change rather than selection.     

Judging presidential character: The demise of Gary Hart

This article investigates the public reaction to the scandal which effectively ended Gary Hart's quest for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. Employing NES panel data covering the period in which the scandal surfaced, and integrating arguments drawn from research on attitude change, media priming, and candidate evaluation, this analysis of the Hart case illuminates more general questions about how citizens respond to media communications during the course of an election campaign and of the factors that facilitate or inhibit attitude change. The investigation lends support to contemporary theories of attitude change that emphasize citizens' levels of political involvement and prior predispositions; uncovers evidence of media priming as views about controversial standards of morality were newly engaged in defining citizens' post-scandal evaluations of Hart; and yields evidence that negative responses to Hart in the wake of the scandal were tempered among citizens who typically weigh policy criteria alongisde candidate characteristics when formulating their overall candidate evaluations.     

The rise of right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands: A discursive opportunity approach

This article seeks to explain the dramatic rise of Pim Fortuyn's right-wing populist party during the campaign for the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands in 2002. Fortuyn succeeded in attracting by far the most media attention of all political actors and his new party won 17 per cent of the votes. This article analyses how this new populist party managed to mobilise so much attention and support so suddenly and so rapidly. It uses the notion of 'discursive opportunities' and argues that the public reactions to Pim Fortuyn and his party played a decisive role in his ability to further diffuse his claims in the public sphere and achieve support among the Dutch electorate. The predictions of the effects of discursive opportunities are empirically investigated with longitudinal data from newspapers and opinion polls. To study the dynamics of competition over voter support and over space in the public debate during the election campaign, an ARIMA time-series model is used as well as a negative binomial regression with lagged variables to account for the time-series structure of the data. It is found that discursive opportunities have significantly affected the degree to which Fortuyn was successful both in the competition for voter support, and regarding his ability to express his claims in the media. Combining these two results, a dynamic feedback process is identified that can explain why a stable political situation suddenly spiralled out of equilibrium. Visibility and supportive reactions of others positively affected the opinion polls. Consonance significantly increased Fortuyn's claim-making; dissonance undermined it. Furthermore, electoral support and negative claims on the issue of immigration and integration in the media by others enhanced Fortuyn's ability to further diffuse his viewpoints and to become the main political opinion-maker during the turbulent election campaign of 2002.     

Local racial context,campaign messaging,and public political behavior: A congressional campaign field experiment

Local racial contexts influence public opinion and voting behaviors. This paper argues that differences in community racial demographics also change public political behavior and influence the effectiveness of different campaign appeals to change public political behaviors of white Americans. Using data from an experiment run by a congressional primary campaign, I examine the responses of white Republicans to display a yard sign of a white Republican running against a Latino Republican. Consistent with theories of racial threat, whites in Latino neighborhoods were more likely to be willing to post yard signs. Moreover, the results also show that the effectiveness of different campaign appeals varies by neighborhood racial context. These findings show that racial diversity affects the public political behaviors of white Americans and, more importantly, changes the effectiveness of different campaign appeals.     

The Quiet Revolution? The Labour Party and Welfare Conditionality

Labour's 2017 general election manifesto contained a pledge to ‘end the punitive sanctions regime’ in the British welfare state. Whilst the specific implications of this pledge were not elaborated, such a policy would nevertheless constitute a profound break with a welfare consensus spanning over twenty years. The depth of the suggested changes on welfare are also evident in the scale of reform proposed to disability benefits, as well as plans—confirmed in August 2018 by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell—to pilot universal basic income. Collectively, these policies would seemingly be deeply at odds with public opinion on the benefits system, which over the course of the last two decades has significantly hardened. Yet despite the seemingly radical and controversial nature of the policy, it received very little media or public attention during the election campaign. This article explores Labour's ‘quiet revolution’ on welfare, examining whether Labour's new welfare approach is indeed a bold attempt to reshape public opinion on welfare or, alternatively, a mostly pragmatic reaction to changing social attitudes. The argument presented is that whilst there are persuasive explanations that Labour is responding to a change in the public mood, there is also evidence of a more ambitious goal at stake: the aim of reshaping, not simply responding to, public opinion on the welfare state.     

PUBLIC OPINION REACTION TO REPEATED EVENTS: Citizen Response to Multiple Supreme Court Abortion Decisions

While numerous works explores how single events or political actions affect public opinion, almost no research explores how this effect evolves with repeated actions. The Conditional Response Model holds that while elite actors can influence and polarize the public when they first act on an issue, subsequent action will not have this same effect. We challenge this model based on its depiction of psychological models of attitude formation and change. Instead of focusing on the number of times an actor has addressed an issue, we argue that the state of public opinion is the key to determining how the public will react to multiple elite actions over a long timeframe. We examine how the public reacted to multiple Supreme Court decisions on abortion. Our results suggest that the Conditional Response Model does a poor job of depicting public opinion and that actors are not limited in their influence by the number of previous actions on an issue.     

The Material Culture of US Elections

Abstract

The abiding motif of election campaigns in the USA is not the spot ad, nor the candidate debate, nor even the campaign Web site, but instead remains the campaign button. It should be consigned to history by fast paced development of campaigns into modern technologies, but there are still hundreds of designs produced quadrennially for national campaigns, and many more for races at all levels. Even if the life of the campaign button is coming to a close, it has been a long run, from the brass buttons of 1789, to the tiny framed daguerreotypes of the mid-19th century, through the celluloid buttons of the 1890s, to the chip implanted versions of today.

But the campaign button is just the most ubiquitous example of the material culture of the US election. It has been modified by changes in artisan skills, industrial production, bulk availability, the changes in inexpensive materials and manufactures, and cost effectiveness and profitability. Over the same period of time many other artefacts have been used by entrepreneurs and campaigns to bring the candidates and their public together at the same time as making a profit-either financial or political. This article discusses the role of entrepreneurship, changing industrial technology, and the emergence of newly cost-effective materials, as contexts for the creation of the wealth of campaign ephemera that has adapted to change and maintained its place in the campaign for over 200 years.     

公信力:文明政府的重要指标——兼谈政府如何赢得公信

近年来,许多案例表明政府公信力在下降。本文依据学术界有关信任的一般理论,讨论了政府公信力的内涵、意义和来源,简要分析了政府公信力流失的原因,指出重构政府公信力需要一场持久的诚实施政运动和政府再造工程。     

Driving less for better air: Impacts of a public information campaign

In the wake of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, localities across the United States initiated public information campaigns both to raise awareness of threats to air quality and to change behavior related to air pollution by recommending specific behavioral changes in the campaign messages. These campaigns are designed to reduce the health hazards associated with poor air quality and to avoid federal sanctions resulting from the failure to meet air quality standards. As in many other communities across the country, a coalition of government agencies and businesses initiated a public information campaign in the Atlanta metropolitan region to reduce certain targeted behaviors, mainly driving. A two‐stage model used to analyze data from a rolling sample survey shows that the centerpiece of the information campaign—air quality alerts—was effective in raising awareness and reducing driving in a segment of the population. When the overall information campaign was moderated by employers' participation in programs to improve air quality, drivers significantly reduced the number of miles they drove and the number of trips they took by car on days when air quality alerts were sounded. Public information campaigns can be successful in increasing awareness, but changing well‐established behaviors, such as driving, is likely to require institutional mediation to provide social contexts that support the behavioral change, as well. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Measuring the boundaries of America's permanent campaign

This research measures the boundaries of the “permanent campaign” practiced by spokespeople for the United States government. Scholars have accused modern White House communications staff of conducting a permanent campaign by prioritizing presidential public opinion ratings over good governance. However, researchers have not previously measured whether this campaign is conducted exclusively from the White House, or if government agencies are also involved—dramatically increasing the potential scale and scope of the campaign. The researcher conducted a rare set of interviews with public affairs officers who worked for the Treasury Department during the administrations of Presidents Obama and George W. Bush to find out whether they utilize public opinion ratings in their work and whether they attempt to play to the emotions, rather than the reason, of the American people. This study finds that the Treasury is not conducting a permanent campaign. The results demonstrate that the campaign is not practiced in a cabinet agency critical to presidential political fortunes and reelection prospects, suggesting that it is likely confined to the White House.     

Do parties respond strategically to opinion polls? Evidence from campaign statements

This article investigates how parties respond to polling results on the campaign trail. I argue that parties use pre-election polls as mobilization and fine-tuning devices. Opinion surveys that exceed expectations can be exploited to mobilize the party base. Disappointing polls, in turn, are publicly downplayed and criticized. However, this information can be used to refine campaign strategies. Parties underperforming in the polls have incentives to emphasize their own policy positions and to attack other parties. These arguments are supported by evidence from 2140 campaign statements by Portuguese party leaders over two elections, combined with polling results. The findings suggest that parties carefully adjust their campaign rhetoric in response to public opinion signals. The study contributes to research on elite behavior and political representation. Moreover, it shows how research on campaign effects can benefit from a closer attention to the supply-side of campaigns.     

Lessons of reform in the Ontario Civil Service

There is a dramatic process of change taking place in the province of Ontario, Canada, which points to and highlights the need for utter political commitment for change. This is taking place in an environment that contains within it many of the structural problems being experienced by member countries. This article reviews the current plans and actions and draws lessons from Ontario's experience in developing a professional competent public service over a period of time, during which the expectations of the service have changed radically. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

Budget-Making for Social Purposes

A theory of the budgetary process within public resource allocation has to recognize two basic properties of budgetary behavior and budgetary interaction: variation over time and program variation. Our results indicate that the hypothesis of program variation is worthy of effort, as we find different decision mechanisms operating in the six programs studied, which belong to different categories of public resource allocation. Variation over time is particularly difficult to accommodate within the framework of incrementalist notions: incremental decision rules imply structural stability over time slices. We find the opposite to be true in two of the program types analyzed, the transfer programs and the service programs. Bureaucratic programs may look incremental; however, that may only be an appearance, as a closer analysis of the data indicates that the decision mechanism involves the occurrence of shift-points or non-incremental changes. A theory of the public expenditure process has to take into account both incremental decision strategies and non-incremental ones, which requires an econometric methodology based on the possibility of structural variability. Such a methodology includes the use of both test statistics and estimation techniques suitable to the occurrence of structural variability.     

Policy Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change: Multilevel Governance of Central Banking Reform

Recent studies on institutional theory and the public policy field called for efforts to pry open the black box of institutional and policy change. This article offers a response to this call. It demonstrates that historical and discursive institutionalist approaches are complementary to explain how and why institutional change occurs. In addition, it shows how these approaches can add value to and benefit from the public policy and administration fields that seek to explain policy change and success. In particular, it emphasizes the interactions between structure and agency that contribute to the change. The empirical finding is based on qualitative analysis of central banking reform in Turkey. It suggests that institutional and policy change is more likely to occur when policy entrepreneurs, with joint membership in domestic and transnational policy communities, mediate various ideas and discourse within and among these communities in a punctuated institutional equilibrium.     

Big expectations, small outcomes: The impact of leaders' personal appeal in the 2004 Greek election

The 2004 Greek election provides an interesting case study for examining the impact of party leaders on the vote. A change in governing party leadership a few months before polling day had two important implications. First, it generated a highly favourable context for the emergence of decisive leadership effects. Second, it made it feasible to grasp empirically how voters form their evaluations of new leaders. Regarding the first question, the findings indicate that even in the most favourable environment the impact of leadership evaluations on the overall electoral outcome is only slight. Regarding the second, it seems that the change of leader at the start of an election campaign can be a mixed blessing. Whereas it can help a party to divert media and public focus from other less favourable issues, the party pays a corresponding price when its new leader has to learn the job in the full glare of an election campaign.     

Response Latency Methodology for Survey Research: Measurement and Modeling Strategies

In public opinion research, response latency is a measure ofattitude accessibility, which is the ease or swiftness withwhich an attitude comes to mind when a respondent is presentedwith a survey question. Attitude accessibility represents thestrength of the association in memory between an attitude objectand an evaluation of the object. Recent research shows thatattitude accessibility, as measured by response latency, castslight on a wide range of phenomena of public opinion and politicalbehavior. We discuss response latency methodology for surveyresearch and advocate the use of latent response latency timers(which are invisible both to respondents and interviewers) asa low cost, low-maintenance alternative to traditional methodsof measuring response latency in public opinion surveys. Weshow that with appropriate model specification latent responselatency timers may provide a suitable alternative to the morecomplicated and expensive interviewer-activated timers.     

Public Attitudes towards Taxation: Sweden 1981–1997

Claims have been raised from different perspectives that the welfare state suffers from eroding public support. From an examination of public attitudes towards taxation in Sweden by utilising survey data spanning the period 1981–1997, it is concluded that no long-term trend of increased tax discontent can be distinguished. There are, however, some indications that discontent with taxation has increased during the most recent years. Social conflicts over the preferred distribution and levels of taxes vary in intensity over time, but are foremost structured by class, income, and, to a lesser extent, sector of employment. It is argued that the observed attitude patterns can to some extent be understood as responses to changes in tax and welfare policy.     

Do Politics in Europe Benefit from Politicising Corruption?

In this article, two unexplored trends in European electoral politics are highlighted. Using newly collected data the article tracks the politicisation of corruption in electoral campaigns from 1981 to 2011, an electoral strategy that has been increasing over time in most European countries. It then empirically tests two aspects of this campaign strategy. First, what are the factors that are systematically associated with a party’s decision to politicise corruption? Second, what are the electoral effects in terms of relative vote share for parties that politicise corruption? Using an original data-set that employs multi-level data (parties nested in countries) the results demonstrate first that politicisation of corruption occurs systematically more often among established parties from the main opposition, new parties and parties on the political right, and occurs as a function of country-level corruption, district magnitude and public party financing. Second, it is found that the main opposition and new parties that use such a campaign strategy make significant electoral gains relative to the previous election compared to parties that do not politicise corruption. Yet gains are offset in low-corruption countries. The findings demonstrate salient implications for research on party systems, corruption studies and democratic legitimacy, among other areas of investigation.     

U.S. Congressional Campaign Communications in an Internet Age

New technologies – with perhaps the most notable being radio and television – often change the face of political campaigns. The Internet, and particularly campaign websites with their concomitant technologies (e.g. interactive and multimedia features), has evolved at a faster rate than any other prior innovation. This raises a critical question: have website technologies altered how congressional candidates campaign? We address this question with a novel dataset from 2008. Not only do we chart technological change on sites over the course of the campaign but we also explore how and when candidates use certain technologies. We discover two critical and, to our knowledge, novel points. First, congressional candidates use these technologies to a much lesser extent than one may suspect. Second, their scant usage is driven by how certain technologies limit control of the candidate's message, the candidate's status in the race and other key variables such as the employment of campaign consultants. In sum, the Web 2.0 era (which began around 2008) does not appear to have dramatically altered congressional campaigns.     

Incumbency effects in U.S. presidential campaigns: Language patterns matter

Incumbent U.S. presidential candidates have been overwhelmingly successful over the past 150 years. Attempts to explain this success rate have examined both structural advantages enjoyed by incumbents and differences in rhetorical and linguistic style in campaigning, although it is less clear why incumbency conveys an advantage here. This article finds that the language used by U.S. presidential candidates over the past twenty years has an underlying structure associated with electoral success: 1. speech patterns of incumbents differ notably from those they used in their first-term campaign; and 2. speech patterns of winners are different from those of losers. Both differences are consistent, and can therefore be postulated to indicate strength of influence. The resulting inductive model of influential language is characterized by: increased positivity, complete absence of negativity, increased abstraction, and lack of reference to the opposing candidate(s). The greatest intensity of model language is used by incumbents in their second campaign and the least by losers in a first-cycle open campaign. Language improvement by incumbents occurs rapidly, suggesting that it is the result of changing self-perception rather than a conventional learning process. This finding has broader implications, suggesting that both success, and the presence of competing groups trying to make similar arguments, improve the quality of the influencing language used.