Ideology and interests in congressional voting: The politics of abortion in the U.S. Senate

Many studies suggest that personal ideology accounts for much more of congressional voting behavior than does attention to the desires of the electorate. There are two main explanations given for this seemingly robust conclusion: 1) poor measures of constituency preferences compared to those for ideology or behavior, and 2) representatives “shirk” on an inattentive electorate. We argue that existing studies have been biased against the “interest” explanation by ignoring the structure of American Congressional elections, in particular the party primary process. Correcting for the party primary effect, we show, within the context of abortion politics, that constituency interests possess greater explanatory power than previous models would suggest.     

Political Marketing Research in the 2000 U.S. Election

Abstract

It is not news that polls and other forms of marketing research are regularly employed to craft political strategy. What is new is that the 2000 U.S. election represented a turning point where political marketing research seems to take center stage. The print and broadcast media employed polls and other forms of research at levels far beyond anything ever seen before. At times, it appeared as if almost as much attention was being given to polls as was being given to the political candidates and the issues. This was clearly a new and important posturing of the role of political marketing research. With this as a backdrop, the current article compares polls and other forms of political research-focusing on what went wrong and what was right in terms of the use of polls, focus groups and Internet research during the 2000 U.S. election. The article ends with the presentation of some exploratory research that examines insights about respondents' opinions regarding the impact of political polls.     

Ideology and Vote Choice in U.S. Mayoral Elections: Evidence from Facebook Surveys

City elections in the U.S. are widely thought to be low-information contests decided by non-ideological factors. This consensus casts doubt on the possibility of electoral accountability in cities, and renders recent evidence of municipal responsiveness puzzling. However, our knowledge of how voters actually behave in local elections is severely limited by a lack of individual-level survey data collected from local contests. Using three such original surveys, I re-examine the role of ideology in mayoral elections, recruiting samples of local voters via geotargeted Facebook advertisements. In two large cities, I find ideology is a powerful and independent predictor of vote choice. Using a panel design, I find voters learn the relative ideological positions of candidates over the course of a campaign, and that learning causally impacts vote choice. The effect of ideology also replicates in a conjoint experiment fielded to a sample of small-city voters in another region. Electoral accountability is thus a plausible explanation for ideological responsiveness in U.S. cities, and the methodological tools introduced here can now be applied to a variety of questions about local voter behavior.     

Estimating the Effect of Rent-Seeking on income distribution: an analysis of U.S. States and Counties

Public Choice - Prior empirical research on rent seeking has focused on estimating its effects on overall macroeconomic performance, with few studies attentive to income distribution. This paper...     

The World Wide Web and the U.S. Political News Market

We propose a framework for understanding how the Internet has affected the U.S. political news market. The framework is driven by the lower cost of production for online news and consumers' tendency to seek out media that conform to their own beliefs. The framework predicts that consumers of Internet news sources should hold more extreme political views and be interested in more diverse political issues than those who solely consume mainstream television news. We test these predictions using two large datasets with questions about news exposure and political views. Generally speaking, we find that consumers of generally left‐of‐center (right‐of‐center) cable news sources who combine their cable news viewing with online sources are more liberal (conservative) than those who do not. We also find that those who use online news content are more likely than those who consume only television news content to be interested in niche political issues.     

The Impact of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act on the U.S. Poultry Industry: A Comparative Analysis

IRCA's impact on the U.S. poultry industry has been uneven across industry sectors and regions. In California, where undocumented immigrants have been present for some decades, IRCA strengthened unions in the processing sector without constricting labor supplies. In other areas of depressed local economies and high unemployment, IRCA has had little impact. Where low-wage industrial recruitment has increased competition for unskilled workers, however, plants have been relying on documented and undocumented new immigrants for labor. Although new immigrants stabilize industry work forces in the short run, over time these immigrant inflows reinforce high labor turnover and fuel the tendency for technological changes to accommodate an unskilkd labor force.     

Valuing Diversity in Political Organizations: Gender and Token Minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives

Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory explains how minority group size affects how members of a political organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues, predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual‐level colleague valuation is greatest when the minority group is smallest. We test this prediction using member‐to‐member leadership political action committee (PAC) contributions in the U.S. House of Representatives. The results obtain strong, albeit not uniform, support for the theory, demonstrating that the gender gap in colleague valuations declines as preference divergence increases in all but one instance. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the theory and evidence indicate that women serving in the U.S. House of Representatives receive less support from men colleagues as their ranks increase.     

Political economy of the U.S. temporary duty suspension program: An empirical note

We examine every TDS Bill introduced by the House of Representatives and approved by the U.S. International Trade Commission in the last six years. The significant relationship between these bills and campaign contributions coupled with the personal characteristics of proponents and sponsors influence the policy outcomes of the U.S. TDS Program.     

Political Science and Prediction: What's Next for U.S. Climate Change Policy?

This article analyzes how U.S. climate change politics and policy making are changing in the public, private and civil society sectors, and how such changes are likely to influence U.S. federal policies. It outlines the current status of U.S. climate change action and explores four overlapping pathways of policy change: (1) the strategic demonstration of the feasibility of climate change action; (2) the creation and expansion of markets; (3) policy diffusion and learning; and (4) the creation and promulgation of norms about the need for more aggressive climate change action. These four pathways seek to fruitfully draw from rationalist and constructivist approaches to policy analysis, without collapsing or confusing the different logics. Building on this analysis, it predicts that future federal U.S. climate policy will include six major components: (1) A national cap on GHG emissions; (2) A national market based cap‐and‐trade GHG emissions trading scheme; (3) Mandatory renewable energy portfolio standards; (4) Increased national product standards for energy efficiency; (5) Increased vehicle fleet energy efficiency standards; and (6) Increased federal incentives for research and development on energy efficiency issues and renewable energy development. In addition, expanding federal climate policy may bring about significant changes in U.S. foreign policy as U.S. international re‐engagement on climate change is likely to occur only after the development of more significant federal policy.     

Strengthening the Political Safeguards of Federalism: The Fate of Recent Federalism Legislation in the U.S. Congress

Although a number of measures have been proposed during thepast decade to require the U. S. Congress to take more accountof state and local interests, whether in regard to mandates,preemptions, regulations, or grants-in-aid, the only major successhas been passage of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995(UMRA). This article examines the fate of the dozen bills thatprogressed far enough to be the subject of a committee hearingor receive a vote in the House or Senate. Only a few of thesemeasures, most of them rather modest in scope, were enacted,while the most significant measures were rejected, largely becausestate and local governments have experienced a number of difficultiesin reproducing the conditions that were present for the passageof UMRA. Health, labor, and environmental groups were able toblock a number of these bills. Business groups occasionallyparted company with state and local governments and worked todefeat federalism legislation. Finally, state and local governmentgroups have not always been united in support of these measures.     

列宁与葛兰西意识形态论比较研究

本文中的意识形态论研究包括意识形态的概念界定、意识形态的形成路径和意识形态的制度建设等三个维度。在这三个方面,列宁和葛兰西分别提出了具有重要学理影响和实际意义的系列观点和见解。比较而言,列宁和葛兰西都把意识形态视为一种上层建筑,都认为意识形态的形成是建立在一定经济基础之上的、需要知识分子参与的一个动态过程,都强调宣传和教育是意识形态制度建设的主要手段,但在具体论述上层建筑的构成、意识形态理论的分层、知识分子的历史作用以及宣传教育的具体方法时,他们却分别得出了不同的见解。对这些异同点进行比较研究,是本文的主要任务。     

The Effect of Fact‐Checking on Elites: A Field Experiment on U.S. State Legislators

Does external monitoring improve democratic performance? Fact‐checking has come to play an increasingly important role in political coverage in the United States, but some research suggests it may be ineffective at reducing public misperceptions about controversial issues. However, fact‐checking might instead help improve political discourse by increasing the reputational costs or risks of spreading misinformation for political elites. To evaluate this deterrent hypothesis, we conducted a field experiment on a diverse group of state legislators from nine U.S. states in the months before the November 2012 election. In the experiment, a randomly assigned subset of state legislators was sent a series of letters about the risks to their reputation and electoral security if they were caught making questionable statements. The legislators who were sent these letters were substantially less likely to receive a negative fact‐checking rating or to have their accuracy questioned publicly, suggesting that fact‐checking can reduce inaccuracy when it poses a salient threat.     

In Play: A Commentary on Strategies in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election

“A lot of military battle plans going back to the Civil War say ‘whoever controls the Mississippi controls America.’ And Bush is marching straight up the Mississippi,” the Democratic strategist said. “We’ve just retreated from Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri. They already control Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky. Bush is now moving in on Iowa and Wisconsin. And except for Illinois, which isn’t in play, there’s only one state left: Minnesota, the mouth of the river. And it’s dead even [i.e., a tie] there.” From CNN.com, ALLPOLITICS, September 23, 2004: Mercurio, John and Molly Levinson. “CNN Survey: Bush widens lead in Electoral College.” CNN Political Unit. 27 Sept. 2004 <http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/ 09/23/electoral.map> “All total, 21 states are in play. Some will bounce between “lean [toward a candidate]” to “tossup” throughout the campaign.” USA Today, July 25, 2004: “AP: Bush leads Kerry in electoral votes.” A.P. 25 July 2004, <whttp://www.usatoday.com/news/Politicselections/nation/President/2004-07-25-bush-kerry-electoral-votes_x.htm>     

Political learning during the 2000 U.S. presidential election: The impact of the campaign on the gender gap in political knowledge

We examine how political campaigns influence individuals’ levels of correct, incorrect, and don’t know responses and the gender gap in political knowledge during the 2000 American presidential campaign. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), we demonstrate that as the campaign progresses the electorate provides more correct answers and fewer incorrect answers. Moreover, the political campaign significantly reduces (and possibly eliminates) the direct effect of sex on political knowledge. While the political campaign decreases the number of incorrect answers provided by both men and women, the number of correct answers provided by women increases. Our findings highlight the importance of the political campaign in determining relative levels of political knowledge for men and women.     

A Model of Political Competition in the Underlying Space of Ideology

This study makes use of the concept of ideology to answerimportant questions of political competition. I develop amulticandidate model in which voters use ideology as asimplifying device that helps them to choose a candidate in anoisy environment. Three important results arise for thehomogeneous-polity case. First, the candidate with moreresources is the one more likely to win the election. Second,a merger between two parties might yield to a higher expectedplurality for the candidate of the newly formed party. Third,political convulsion yields to a decrease in the expectedplurality for the incumbent candidate.     

Needed: A smaller and very different U.S. military

Conclusion How should the Pentagon decide those missions that it will retain in house? Those missions for which it should seek strategic alliances? Those new missions that it will actively seek to develop a competency in? Or those missions that require service competition because they are viewed as critical? Or those missions that have acquired redundancy due to service poaching, and thus can prudently be the target of reductions?The answers to these questions very much depend on the leadership's developing a view of the long-term future that is very different from the past. For example, will the United States be in the business of maintaining stability in troubled Third World regions? If so, what kind of capabilities, what kind of missions, does it see as necessary to conduct effective operations in these conflicts? What can the U.S. military count on from its strategic partnerships with other nations? What competing roles will the U.S. military be asked to play? What resources are available?These are fundamental, first-order questions. But they must all be answered - a credible vision of the business must be established - before restructuring can proceed in a productive manner. This does not imply a definitive prediction of the future; rather, it involves recognizing that the United States is in a period of relatively low danger, high uncertainty and dynamic change. For that reason the defense establishment should restructure to be more flexible, innovative and adaptive. A primary goal should be to exploit rapidly advancing technologies, while meeting (or preferably forestalling) the greatest and most likely challenges to national security. In summary, developing a credible vision of the future security environment, and acting upon it, is essential if the U.S. defense establishment is to avoid the pitfalls of the interwar French military and the IBM of the 1980s, dominant organizations that restructured to be more efficient in a competitive environment that was rapidly passing into history.     

Economic performance and U.S. Senate elections: A comment

This paper investigates the issue of economic performance and U.S. Senate elections analyzed by Bennett and Wiseman (1991) in a work published in this journal. Our study analyzes the electoral margins and election outcomes of U.S. Senate elections using state-level data involving only incumbents up for reelection in the 1976–1990 period (212 elections). The ordinary least squares and logit estimation results suggest that the effects of economic performance variables on incumbent senatorial elections are in general overshadowed by other factors known to be important in determining electoral margins and outcomes. In addition, the empirical results of the entire model are in general consistent with prior findings noted in the public choice and political science literature concerning the analysis of U.S. Senate elections. Therefore, we suggest that the findings raised in our study provide enough theoretical and empirical evidence to raise sufficient doubt regarding the robustness of the results suggested by Bennett and Wiseman (1991), and thus call upon other researchers to study further the relationship between economic performance and voting behavior in U.S. Senate elections.     

The impact of the U.S. war on terrorism upon U.S.-China relations

Using a framework of geopolitical analysis. Oliver Lee argues that the fundamental geopolitical relationships between the United States and China, namely the relationship between the world’s strongest naval and air power and the world’s strongest land power, would not be upset even after the American military presence in central Asia since September 11, 2001. The relationship would remain essentially unaltered because — American initiation of the use of nuclear weapons against China being ruled out for fear of Chinese retaliation — China would be able to withstand any U.S. military offensive conducted with conventional land, sea, and air forces, regardless of whether the U.S. possesses permanent air bases in Central Asia or not, and regardless of how many troops it may station on them. His teaching and research interests include domestic and foreign policies of China and power in America and U.S. foreign policy.