Political environment and voluntary disclosure in the U.S.: Evidence from the Carbon Disclosure Project

We investigate whether the political leaning of the state where a given firm is headquartered is related to that firm's decision to voluntarily disclose climate change information. We study S&P 500 firms that were surveyed by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and find that firms headquartered in more Democratic states are more likely to disclose carbon emissions information to the CDP. Furthermore, firms in more Democratic states are more likely to permit public disclosure of their survey responses and tend to receive higher disclosure scores. We consider two political variables, one based on political power and one based on public political preference. Our results are consistent with political power driving the firm's willingness to voluntarily disclose information about climate change. These results suggest that the relation between the political environment and disclosure is more closely linked to concerns over regulatory threats as opposed to acquiescence to social norms.     

On-line processing in candidate evaluation: The effects of issue order,issue importance,and sophistication

This article reports the results of a study that replicates and extends the impression-driven model of candidate evaluation reported in Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh (1989). This model holds that evaluations are formed and updated on-line as information is encountered, and that as a result, citizens need not rely on specific information available from memory to form their candidate evaluations. In the present work we explore whether the order in which information is encountered, as well as whether information that is personally important, influences the weight accorded to evidence in on-line processing. In addition, differences in information-processing strategies due to political sophistication are examined. The results indicate that important information receives more weight than unimportant information. In addition, the evidence suggests that political sophisticates are more efficient on-line processors than are less sophisticated individuals. The implications of these results for models of candidate evaluation are discussed.     

Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environment

In a democracy, knowledge is power. Research explaining the determinants of knowledge focuses on unchanging demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. This study combines data on the public's knowledge of nearly 50 political issues with media coverage of those topics. In a two-part analysis, we demonstrate how education, the strongest and most consistent predictor of political knowledge, has a more nuanced connection to learning than is commonly recognized. Sometimes education is positively related to knowledge. In other instances its effect is negligible. A substantial part of the variation in the education-knowledge relationship is due to the amount of information available in the mass media. This study is among the first to distinguish the short-term, aggregate-level influences on political knowledge from the largely static individual-level predictors and to empirically demonstrate the importance of the information environment .     

The triumph of regulatory politics: Benefit–cost analysis and political salience

While benefit–cost analysis (BCA) is now a permanent part of the regulatory process in the United States, and many other countries around the world as well as the European Union have adopted it or are moving toward it, there have been few empirical attempts to assess either whether its use improves regulations or how BCA interacts with the political environment. We use a unique US database of the costs and benefits of 109 economically significant regulations issued between 2000 and 2009 to examine whether the amount of information provided in the BCA or political factors surrounding the regulation better correlate with the net benefits of the regulation. We find that there is little correlation between the information provided by the analysis and the net benefits. However, we find that regulations that receive few public comments and are not issued at the end of an administration, have the highest net benefits. These are the regulations that are the least politically salient. This interaction between the political environment and the economic performance of a regulation has been under‐examined and deserves further study.     

Effect of Media Environment Diversity and Advertising Tone on Information Search,Selective Exposure,and Affective Polarization

This paper examines the effects of our modern media environment on affective polarization. We conducted an experiment during the last month of the 2012 presidential election varying both the choice of media sources available about the major presidential candidates, and the tone of political advertisements presented to subjects. We posit that voters in a high-choice, ideologically-diverse media environment will exhibit greater affective polarization than those in a “mainstream” ideologically neutral environment. We also hypothesize that subjects who are exposed to negative rather than positive political advertisements will show increased affective polarization. We provide causal evidence that the combination of a high-choice ideologically diverse media environment and exposure to negative political ads, significantly increases affective polarization. We also find that both overall information search and selective exposure to information are influenced by our experimental manipulations, with the greatest amount of search, and the most biased search, conducted by Romney supporters in the Negative Ads, Diverse Media condition.     

Citizens, Representatives, and the Myth of the Decision-Making Divide

In this study, I use a computerized experiment to test whether elected officials differ from everyday citizens in how they use information to make political choices. Ninety state and local level elected officials took part in the study, as did 179 adults from the general population. I tracked participants’ information use as they attempted to solve two hypothetical public policy problems. The data show that while elected officials differ from everyday citizens in their demographics and in the consistency of their political views, these groups did not differ systematically in their depth of information search, their proclivity to compare choice alternatives, or their depth of information processing. These findings held across two different public policy scenarios, controlling for differences in political knowledge, education, and elective experience. In addition to opening a new methodological frontier for the study of political elites, these results accelerate an ongoing debate between Burkeian paternalists and advocates of a more populist democracy.     

Senior Executives' Political Connections and Corporate Environmental Behavior—Empirical Research From the Chinese A‐Share Market

This thesis analyzed the cross‐section data of 630 non‐financial listed enterprises and adopts a logit model to estimate the relationships between political relations and corporate environmental behavior. The paper also adopts an ordered logit method to estimate the marginal impact of political connections to enterprises’ disclosure of information on environment and sustainable development. Through analysis, this thesis found that political connections lower the probability for enterprises to disclose information on environment and sustainable development. With the Level III scoring method, this article classified the performances of disclosing corporate environmental information into three levels. It is found that corporate political connections increase the probability for enterprises not to disclose any environmental information and lower the probability for enterprises to refer to GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.     

Lies, Defection, and the Pattern of International Cooperation

This article characterizes how incentives to lie affect international cooperation and the design of cooperation agreements. I study the optimal structure of cooperation agreements in an environment where the costs of cooperation fluctuate over time. Cooperation is complicated by the fact that the costs of cooperation are private information and participants can benefit from lying about them. When the extent of asymmetries of information between the cooperating governments can be measured in terms of the transparency of the political process, democracies face greater contracting opportunities than authoritarian regimes. However, this article shows that even under asymmetries of information, a limited extent of cooperation can be achieved when the design of cooperation agreements recognizes incentives to lie.     

Identities, Interests, and Imports

There is increasing attention to the mass public in the politics of trade debate, yet we still know little about how Americans formulate opinion on trade. Scholars are puzzled by the ineffectiveness of traditional dispositional beliefs to account for trade policy judgment, while an emerging economic self-interest perspective contends that opinion on trade is based on material concerns. This article demonstrates how symbolic predispositions provide critical information shortcuts for Americans on trade in which the relationship between trade policy and economic self-interest may be unclear. Symbolic politics theory explains how citizens can rely on accessible symbolic predispositions, including conceptions of national identity, in an unfamiliar and evolving trade policy environment often subject to multiple and conflicting cues, limited political information, and changing economic circumstances.     

The partisan heuristic and the voters’ knowledge: The essential role of the information environment

The low-information rationality theory expects voters with low political knowledge to make more use of the partisan heuristic than those with high knowledge. However, empirical studies on decision making in direct democracy observe a positive correlation between political knowledge and the use of party cues. We resolve this tension between theory and empirical evidence by demonstrating that the relationship between political knowledge and the use of party cues is conditional on the information environment. We provide evidence for this hypothesis by exploiting a natural experiment in Switzerland and analyze a large variety of direct democratic votes. The results show that voters with lower levels of political knowledge tend to align less with their preferred party because they often have a wrong perception of their preferred party’s vote recommendation. However, if information on parties’ position is easily available, their vote choice is at least as much in line with their preferred party as among those with high knowledge. This suggests that in such an information environment voters with low political knowledge strongly rely on the partisan heuristic. Our research note supports the low-information rationality theory and this way contributes to the literature on the quality of political opinion formation and the political psychology of reasoning and decision making.     

Election Campaigns,Issue Focus and Voting Intentions: Survey Experiments of Norwegian Voters

This article investigates whether and how changes in issue focus in election campaigns affect voting intention, even if no preference change takes place, and whether such effects vary systematically across different groups of voters. Evidence is reported from two survey experiments of Norwegian voters, where respondents were treated with information drawing their attention towards issues pertaining either to immigration or the environment. Although irrelevant for policy learning or persuasion, this information strongly increased the support of particular parties. More specifically, parties with ‘ownership’ of the issues involved gained votes. Certain types of voters were more likely to change voting intentions post‐treatment than others, but which types crucially depended on the issue area under focus. Nevertheless, the results indicate that the issue focus of campaigns is very important for vote choice. Hence, one should expect that, for instance, even ‘neutral’ political news coverage at or close to election day could affect voters in predictable ways. Furthermore, one should expect different parties to fight hard to steer the focus of campaigns towards issues where they have ownership.     

Mystifying but not misleading: when does political ambiguity not confuse voters?

The purpose of political campaigns in democracies is to provide voters with information that allows them to make “correct” choices, that is, vote for the party/candidate whose proposed policy or “position” is closest to their ideal position. In a world where political talk is often ambiguous and imprecise, it then becomes important to understand whether correct choices can still be made. In this paper we identify two elements of political culture that are key to answering this question: (i) whether or not political statements satisfy a so-called “grain of truth” assumption, and (ii) whether or not politicians make statements that are comparative, that is contain information about politicians’ own positions relative to that of their adversaries. The “grain of truth” assumption means that statements, even if vague, do not completely misrepresent the true positions of the parties. We find that only when political campaigning is comparative and has a grain of truth, will voters always make choices as if they were fully informed. Therefore, the imprecision of political statements should not be a problem as long as comparative campaigning is in place.     

锦标赛体制、晋升博弈与地方剧场政治

政治锦标赛体制是中国政府官员的一种压力性激励范式与不容选择的政治生态。行政发包并进行量化考核、绩效排名与择优提拔,是政治锦标赛体制的主要表现形式。但实地调查表明,基层政府官员晋升往往是前台与台后多重原因作用的结果。派系关系、政治背景、社会网络等后台因素往往能左右基层干部的晋升。文章以一个县级市的乡镇干部为观察对象,检验了官员激励分析范式———锦标赛体制在基层地方官员晋升竞争中的解释力,重点对地方官员晋升博弈研究提供一个初步的描述类型学,认为推选博弈、排名博弈与借势博弈是地方官员晋升博弈的三种基本类型。本文初步提出了一个地方官员晋升决定因素的剧场分析模型,并指出,在政治锦标赛体制下,民主集中制在未来地方官员的选拔、任用中的积极作用将日益凸显。     

Self-deception as the root of political failure

I consider models of political failure based on self-deception. Individuals discard free information when that information damages their self-image and thus lowers their utility. More specifically, individuals prefer to feel good about their previously chosen affiliations and shape their worldviews accordingly. This model helps explain the relative robustness of political failure in light of extensive free information, and it helps explain the rarity of truth-seeking behavior in political debate. The comparative statics predictions differ from models of either Downsian or expressive voting. For instance, an increased probability of voter decisiveness does not necessarily yield a better result. I also consider political parties as institutions and whether political errors cancel in the aggregate. I find that political failure based on self-deception is very difficult to eliminate.     

Toward a new institutional strategy framework for political marketing

The present literature on political marketing strategy has provided important knowledge about how the material context of technologies, polls or competitors influences strategy formulation. However, less attention has been directed to the constraints facing a political organization from the social context related to habits, norms or social conventions. This article thus aims at bringing organizational new institutional theory into the field of political marketing strategy. Accordingly, it is investigated how political organizations when initiating marketing strategies act or react toward institutionalized demands in their environment, such as issues or ideas that are considered socially appropriate. As such, a strategy framework consisting of a phase model and a typology is developed. The phase model is drawn from extant literature within organizational new institutional theory stating that decision makers will (1) scan information from their environment, (2) interpret this incoming information in available cognitive categories and (3), finally, select a strategy premised on their cognitive interpretations. On this ground, we build a novel typology that specifies which political marketing strategy decision makers will select under different cognitive framings of their environment. Here, we delineate four ideal type political marketing strategies—conformity, decoupling, defense and entrepreneurial—that correspond to how organizational decision makers interpret their institutional surroundings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

The Political Environment and Ballot Proposition Awareness

Studies that examine whether voters make informed decisions on direct legislation and whether direct legislation enhances civic engagement presume a basic awareness of ballot propositions, yet little is known about why some ballot propositions are more widely known than others. Despite the fact that research on awareness of ballot propositions and political awareness focus on individual factors, the political environment plays a vital role. This study seeks to advance our understanding of environmental factors in explaining awareness of ballot propositions. Using data on California ballot elections between the years 1956 and 2000, I find that the political environment has a substantial effect on voter awareness. Specifically, I find that the electoral cycle, media coverage, campaign spending, voter fatigue, the number of days before an election, and issues that concern morality, civil liberties, and civil rights contribute to ballot proposition awareness.     

The Consequences of Political Cynicism: How Cynicism Shapes Citizens’ Reactions to Political Scandals

This paper argues cynicism toward elected officials colors how individuals in the mass public interpret information about political scandals. Specifically, citizens rely on prior levels of cynicism toward elected officials when assessing new information about potential political malfeasance. Drawing on panel data surrounding two prominent political scandals, this paper demonstrates prior levels of cynicism shape individuals?? interpretations of information about scandals, but cynicism does not affect the amount of attention individuals pay to scandals. Ultimately, the results shed light on individual-level variation in response to scandals, and suggest expressed cynicism toward politicians is a politically consequential individual-level attitude that affects whether or not political leaders can survive ethical transgressions.     

Capital, Trade, and the Political Economies of Reform

Existing approaches to the study of economic reform have focused on the mobilization of special interests that oppose liberalization and have tended to assume that reform dynamics follow a similar logic across distinct policy arenas. Analysis of the dynamics of capital account and trade liberalization in 19 Latin American countries between 1985 and 1999 demonstrates otherwise. Movement toward liberalization is shaped systematically by the timing and salience of each reform's distributional costs and partisan political dynamics. In turn, the timing and magnitude of costs are mediated by the economic context, while salience depends on the informational environment. Our findings thus differ from the conventional wisdom on several scores, particularly by emphasizing the ways in which good rather than bad economic conditions can facilitate reforms, the conditionality of legislative politics of reform enactment on whether reforms are characterized by ex ante conflict or fears of ex post blame, and how the type of reform shapes its political dynamics .     

An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting —the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the vote decision that views the quality of decision making as a joint function of individual characteristics and various higher-level campaign factors. We hypothesize that differences in cognitive capacity, political motivation, the availability of political heuristics, and macrolevel factors that affect the difficulty of the choice confronting citizens, including the nature of the political information environment, should all affect the probability of a correct vote. We find significant support for seven proposed hypotheses across three levels of analysis, which places responsibility for incorrect votes on both the individual and our electoral system.