Political information processing: Question order and context effects

Data from two independent field experiments indicate that changes in question order and context may well account for an apparently precipitous decline of interest in politics at the time of the CPS 1978 American National Election Study. Evidence from a question order experiment with the SRC/CPS feeling thermometers also suggests that such contextual artifacts may not be atypical. Indeed, because of the many changes in the content and organization of the election studies over the years, context effects represent plausible rival hypotheses for a number of inexplicable shifts and trends in the time-series. In testing these hypotheses the authors derive and validate an information-processing model of how respondents infer their political states of mind from observations of their own question-answering behavior in the survey interview. In addition, the authors illustrate the wide applicability of the model tosubstantive problems in the discipline and its implications for the survey-based paradigm in political behavior research.     

The private and social value of information in majority decisions

The paper contrasts the value of information at the private level with the social value when all voters have access to information. A sequence of examples illustrates how the private and social value of information changes as the distribution of benefits and costs derived from a project varies across individuals and states of the world.     

Political exchanges of value and the stakeholder concept: Implications for public affairs

The political marketing exchange is triadic in structure, as promises given by political actors in the context of an election campaign can only be reciprocated if 1. the political actor is selected, 2. has influence over legislation negotiations, and 3. is in a position to deliver on these promises. In each of these three ‘interaction marketplaces’, political actors are indirectly influenced by stakeholders. These ‘indirect stakeholders’ are often public affairs practitioners engaged in lobbying activities in the political sphere. This paper integrates the triadic interaction model of political marketing exchange with the political marketing stakeholder concept and highlights how public affairs practitioners can target their efforts for maximum benefit. This aim is motivated by a need to increase our understanding of how political marketing theory can help political actors and their stakeholders to optimise the resources that are used on marketing activities across the electoral cycle.     

Enlargement processes and distributional conflicts: The politics of discriminatory membership in the European Union

This paper examines discriminatory membership in the European Union from a game-theoretical perspective. I argue that discriminatory membership enables the enlargement of international organizations with heterogenous member states. EU members impose discriminatory measures on new members to redistribute enlargement gains from new members to particularly negatively affected EU members as to render expansion pareto-efficient. The empirical findings of a probit analysis on the EU accession negotiations and outcomes of all five EU enlargement rounds support the theoretical claim. The EU grants acceding states restricted membership rights if distributional conflicts emerge. Moreover, the candidate’s bargaining power and the possibility of alternative compensation schemes influence the enlargement outcomes.     

Status versus growth: The distributional effects of school accountability policies

Although the federal No Child Left Behind program judges the effectiveness of schools based on their students' achievement status, many policy analysts argue that schools should be measured, instead, by their students' achievement growth. Using a 10‐year student‐level panel data set from North Carolina, we examine how school‐specific pressure associated with status and growth approaches to school accountability affect student achievement at different points in the prior‐year achievement distribution. Achievement gains for students below the proficiency cut point emerge in schools failing either type of accountability standard, with the effects clearer for math than for reading. In contrast to prior research highlighting the possibility of educational triage, we find little or no evidence that failing schools in North Carolina ignore the students far below proficiency under either approach. Importantly, we find that the status, but not the growth, approach reduces the reading achievement of higher performing students. Our analysis suggests that the distributional effects of accountability pressure depend not only on the type of pressure for which schools are held accountable (status or growth), but also the tested subject. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Political Economy: Political Attitudes and Economic Behavior

It has long been recognized that voters bring their political behaviors in line with economic assessments. Recent work, however, suggests that citizens also engage in economic behaviors that align with their confidence—or lack thereof—in the political system. This alignment can happen consciously or, as we suggest, unconsciously, in the same way that positivity carries over to other behaviors on a micro-level. Using monthly time series data from 1978 to 2008, we contribute further evidence of this relationship by demonstrating that political confidence affects consumer behavior at the aggregate level over time. Our analyses employ measures more closely tied to the theoretical concepts of interest while simultaneously accounting for the complex relationships between subjective and objective economic indicators, economic behavior, political attitudes, and the media. Our results suggest that approval of the president not only increases the electorate’s willingness to spend money, but also affects the volatility of this spending. These findings suggest that the economy is influenced by politics beyond elections, and gives the “Chief Economist” another avenue by which they can affect the behavior of the electorate.     

Political information,social environments,and deviants

This research explores whether an individual's information about politics is influenced by the political environment in which the person is located. It seeks to determine whether and how the political environment influences one's attention to and retention of political information.     

政治文化与政治文明

政治文明是人类运用国家权力配置自身利益的进步状态,主要包括思想认识、心理意识、价值取向、行为方式等的提升和制度、机制、程序、规则等的完善两大部分。其中,政治文化是政治文明的灵魂,也是判定政治文明由低级向高级演进的重要尺度。忽视甚至离开了政治文化的政治文明,必将在实践中萎缩、退化,直至被人类社会政治发展进程所淘汰。     

The Political Value of Land: Political Reform and Land Prices in Chile

In this article, we argue that when patron‐client relations are grounded in economic relationships, such as between landlord and worker, we should expect clientelism to influence not just how public policy, the state, and the political system work, but also how the economy works. We develop a simple model of the economic consequences of electoral clientelism when voting behavior can be observed. Landlords/patrons provide economic rents to workers, and in exchange workers vote for parties favored by landlords. As votes are used by the landlords to accumulate political rents, vote control increases the demand for labor and for land. The model implies that the introduction of the Australian ballot, which destroys this form of clientelism, should lead to a fall in the price of land in those areas where patron‐client relationships are strongest. We test the predictions of the model by examining in detail the evolution of land prices in Chile around May 31, 1958, for which we collected original data. A characteristic of rural Chile at this time were patron‐client relations based on the inquilinaje system, by which a worker, the inquilino, entered into a long‐term, often hereditary, employment relationship with a landlord and lived on his landlord’s estate. We show that the introduction of the Australian ballot in 1958 led to a fall of about 26% in land prices in the areas where these patron‐client relationships were predominant.     

Building Political Participation: The Role of Family Policy and Political Science Courses

This mixed-methods study examined the long-term associations between two kinds of politics courses—required political science courses and required family policy courses—and the political participation, knowledge, skill, efficacy, and politically engaged identity of child and family studies alumni. Two special cases were examined: those who remembered their required political science and policy courses compared with the other groups. Additionally, open-ended responses were coded and analyzed. Together, the quantitative and qualitative data suggest that college courses impacted alumni political awareness in college but political awareness did not translate as strongly into later political participation as previous literature has assumed. Findings highlight the importance of postcollege personal connections and work experience in shaping political participation. Educators and researchers should consider this complex relationship between what students learn in college and what they may later experience in adulthood when developing curriculum for students who are not political science majors.     

From the headscarf to the burqa: the role of social theorists in shaping laws against the veil

Abstract

Opposition to the burqa is widespread in Europe but not in the United States. What explains the difference? Focusing primarily on the French case and its Belgian facsimile, we seek to underscore the role of social theorists in legitimizing bans on the full veil. Ironically, this role has been largely disregarded by Anglophone theorists who write on the veil, and who often oppose its prohibition. This article suggests that Europe tends to be more repressive towards full veils because its political process is more open to multiple theoretical representations of the phenomenon of veiling. Conversely, the United States is more open to the provocative display of religious symbols in public because the political process is pre-structured by legal conventions that tend to filter out social theory. The push to ban the burqa in France principally derives from its brand of republicanism rather than being a product of racism and Islamophobia. Of particular significance in the French case is the emphasis on reciprocity as a political principle, a principle that is elongated into an ideal of sociability by French theorists in different disciplines. The arguments of these theorists are described, their rationale is explained and the impact of their intervention on the policy process is documented. The French case, where the popular press and legislature play a major role in shaping policy towards the burqa, is contrasted with that of the United States, where the judiciary, defending religious freedom, remains the most influential collective actor. Each country has correspondingly different attitudes to democracy. In France, the mission of democracy is to extend political equality to the social realm whereas in the United States it is religion that is prioritized so as to protect that which is deemed most sacred to the individual.     

Perceptional inequality and preferential judgements: An empirical examination of distributional axioms

There are two categories of income distribution evaluations: first, the more-or-less “value-free” perception of income inequality as a statistical dispersion; and second, the valuation of income distributions according to an explicit social welfare function which is meant to capture all of society's value judgements. These societal value judgements can be expressed in the form of preferences. Whereas the inequality perception of income distributions appeals to an observer's sober judgement, the revelation of preferences with respect to specific income distributions appeals to his or her sentiments. This paper is an empirical analysis which investigates the juxtaposition of preferences with respect to income distributions and corresponding perceptions of distributional inequality. We do this through a questionnaire in which attitudes towards various distributional axioms are tested. The source of our data is 1773 completed questionnaires collected from five German universities. Based on our data, we observe that individuals' preference orderings over the set of income distributionssubstantially deviate from their perceptions of distributional inequality. In fact, our test responses showed that even when some income distribution is judged to be more unequal than another, that distribution might be preferred, as it accords higher incomes to each individual. We hold that the preference for these greater incomes expresses a compensation for the increased degree of inequality. This explanation applies both to equiproportional and to equal fixed-sum increases in incomes, which implies a support of Paretian ethics.     

社会主义政治文明建设与政治文化革新

要建设社会主义政治文明,不仅要积极推进社会主义民主的制度建设,而且必须认真进行政治文化的革新。为此,必须清除我国封建政治文化残余对发展社会主义民主的消极影响,吸收和借鉴人类政治文化的有益成果,努力建构适合中国国情、有利于社会主义民主发展的新型政治文化。     

The Primacy of the Political: Rahe and the Myth of the Polis

Paul Rahe belongs to the long tradition of mythologizing the polis , otherwise known as 'the classical republican tradition', which has two signal achievements to its credit. The first is to claim for the great landed monarchies of Europe the democratic legacy of the polis as their very own. The second is to distance themselves from eastern regimes by characterizing them as 'despotic' and 'other'. This tradition is seriously challenged by modern classical and Near Eastern scholarship, which shows city-republican forms to have originated in the east. Rahe's particular version is open to the additional challenge that it glorifies the male warrior polis , from which women were systematically excluded, 'as a moral community of men united by a common way of life', as if a community which depended on the labour of women but gave them no rights could have moral integrity.