Modeling Political Efficacy and Interest Group Membership

Traditionally, political efficacy is measured at the individual level and studied as an individual level attribute in isolation from macro level events. In many studies, political efficacy is viewed as largely static, affected primarily by levels of income and education. If, however, an individual's feeling of efficacy is partly conditioned on macro level occurrences or expected macro level occurrences, then individual efficacy cannot be studied in isolation from the macro level context. In this article, I create a game theoretic, micro level foundation for macro level interest group behavior. I use a simple participation game to model a form of individual level political efficacy and detail the empirical implications of the hypothesized individual level behavior for the aggregate levels of group membership. The results suggest that empirical studies of the effects of political efficacy on collective efforts are susceptible to sampling and measurement problems.     

Beyond Membership: A Sense of Community and Political Behavior

Why does community matter for political participation? In this paper, I consider how community psychology, particularly “sense of community” can be used to address questions of political behavior. Individuals’ perceptions about their significance in a given community can have meaningful effects on the way in which communities influence politics. Using a unique survey instrument designed to capture individual’s perceptions of community connectedness and political behavior across five contexts (workplace, church, associations, neighborhood, and circle of friends (i.e., an informal network) I analyze data from 822 respondents and examine how sense of community influences two types of political behavior: voting in local elections and political discussion. The empirical analyses presented demonstrate that sense of community contributes to explaining voting and discussion, even after controlling for demographic, personality, and other political factors.     

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.     

Obligation and welfare policy

Ronald Reagan came to the White House with a reputation for welfare reform that dated from his days as governor of California. The administration's first step was to restrict benefits to working recipients in ways similar to procedures originally proposed in that state. The impact on the AFDC caseload of these changes, however, was modest, and, ironically, the work program opportunities provided by legislation sponsored by the Reagan administration have been exploited as successfully by Democrats such as Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts as by Republicans. Despite frequent references to welfare and welfare problems since 1981, the administration has been notably short of ideas.The silence from the White House has been filled by outsiders - first Murray and then Mead and others such as journalists Mickey Kaus (1986) and Nicholas Lemann (1986). While Losing Ground argued for the government's retirement from the field in the War on Poverty, Mead offered a vision certain to make both liberals and the administration uncomfortable. On the one hand, his demand for creative statecraft calls for substantial government activism, a renewed attack. On the other, his assertion that further progress will require attention to behavioral issues challenges the liberal attitude that what the poor need most is the empowerment that cash can provide. For the concerned public, something about Mead's argument rings true. The poverty we see - homeless derelicts, children of mothers who are children themselves, recipients who reach midlife never having known anything but welfare dependency, neighborhoods in which everyone receives support - hardly seems vulnerable to negative tax payments. And, as Mead suggests, eliminating the present system would create unacceptable hardship. Even if financial incentives are the prime movers in most areas of economic life, we are all a bit embarrassed by them; in the abstract it seems better to say that absent parents are obligated to support their children and able-bodied adults are obligated to work.     

Political Information, Political Involvement, and Reliance on Ideology in Political Evaluation

Many studies have focused on the relationship between political information and the use of ideology. Here, we argue that two “evaluative motivations”—general investment of the self in politics and extremity of partisanship—serve as moderators of this relationship. Specifically, we use data from two recent national surveys to test whether the possession of information is more strongly associated with a tendency to approach politics in an ideological fashion among individuals high in both types of evaluative motivation. Results supported this hypothesis, revealing that information was more strongly associated with ideological constraint and with a tendency to give polarized evaluations of conservatives and liberals among those who highly invest the self in politics and those with more extreme partisanship. As such, this study suggests that information and involvement interact to shape the use of ideology.     

Migration,Internal Security and the UK's EU Membership

A key part of the debate about the UK's membership of the EU is concern about levels of migration and the impact upon security. This paper assesses how much impact EU membership has on each of these issues, and examines the likely impact of leaving the EU in each of these areas.     

Comparing Urban Citizenship,Sanctuary Cities,Local Bureaucratic Membership,and Regularizations

Irregular migrants tend to live in dense urban settings. Cities respond to this phenomenon with a variety of urban immigration and citizenship policies in support of irregular migrants. These urban policies produce a disparity between local inclusion and national exclusion. This article describes and compares such urban policies, namely, urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations. Urban citizenship serves as the normative foundation of these policies because it claims membership for all people who inhabit a city. Regularization programs confer national residency status on irregular migrants. Pro‐immigration actors favor this policy; however, when regularizations are not possible, cities can turn to sanctuary city and local bureaucratic membership policies. It is important for practitioners to comprehend and engage with these types of urban policies since they are likely to travel to cities worldwide.     

Transparency, Political Polarization, and Political Budget Cycles in OECD Countries

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. While some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies, in contrast we show, conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency, that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies. Using a sample of 19 OECD countries in the 1990s, we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low(er) transparency countries, while no such cycles can be observed in high(er) transparency countries. Furthermore, we find, in accordance with recent theory, that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries.     

Liberalism and the Obligation to Military Service

This article argues that liberalism's failure to address systematically the question of citizens' obligation to military service is indicative of its wider failure to develop a satisfactory concept of citizenship. Whilst liberalism's individualist bias, implicit class assumptions and hope of transcending war have all contributed to neglect of citizen duty to bear arms, the most interesting reason, in relation to contemporary republican critiques, is liberalism's inadequate view of citizenship. This article examines the different approaches of the classical English liberals Locke, Bentham and J. S. Mill to international relations, forms of national defence and the role (if any) of citizens, and considers very briefly the views of some contemporary liberal theorists on military service and justified resistance to the draft. Finally, it comments on the implicit reliance of liberal polities on non-liberal models of citizenship, and the need for a coherent liberal concept of citizenship which includes an examination of responsibility for defence.     

Remote Electronic Voting: Free,Fair and Secret?

Most of the debate surrounding remote electronic voting has focused on technical issues such as security and feasibility. This article examines the equally important issue of whether voting outside the context of the supervised polling place meets the legal and normative standards required of democratic elections. Our conclusion is that if voting that takes place in an unsupervised context, it is virtually impossible to guarantee that it will be carried out in secret, and that lack of secrecy constitutes a serious violation of the principles of freeness and fairness that govern elections in democratic states. This argument also has implications for postal voting, which are discussed in brief.     

Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions correctly. Another was given extra time. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11–24%. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents' recall of political facts with variation in their motivation to exert effort during survey interviews. Our work also suggests that existing measures fail to capture relevant political search skills and, hence, provide unreliable assessments of what many citizens know when they make political decisions. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate people's capacities for informed decision making.     

Political Culture, Political System Characteristics, and Public Policies Among the American States

Daniel Elazar's typology of political culture is updated forall states for 1980 using religious affiliation data. On average,the political culture indices do not vary much from simitarmeasures constructed for 1906–1936. The effects of politicalculture on state politics and policy are tested in two ways:(1) by calculating partial correlation coefficients for tendependent variables holding four environmental variables constant(affluence, industrialization, fertility, and liberal politicalideology), and (2) by estimating regression equations withintwo categories of political culture (individualistic and traditionalistic)to gauge the indirect or contextual effects of culture. Thepartial correlation analysis yields the expected outcome—moralisticstates have more interparty competition, higher voter turnout,more policy-relevant parties, and more liberal and innovativepolicies; traditionalistic states show the opposite result.The attempt to assess the contextual effects of political cultureproves less satisfactory. No such effects appear for about halfthe dependent variables, and the contextual effects that arefound correspond only in part to expectations.