Do White In-group Processes Matter,Too? White Racial Identity and Support for Black Political Candidates

Scholars find that negative evaluations of Blacks lead Whites to vote against Black political candidates. However, can an in-group psychological process have the same effect? We consider White racial identity to be a strong candidate for such a process. We argue that the mere presence of a Black candidate cues the identity, reducing support for these candidates among Whites. We test this hypothesis on vote choice in seven instances. Five of them involve simple vote choice models: the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, and three elections in 2010: The Massachusetts Gubernatorial election, Black candidates for the US House, and Black candidates for the US Senate. The other two are tests of the notion that White racial identity reduced President Obama’s approval, thus reducing support for all Democratic Congressional candidates in the 2010 Midterm and 2012 Congressional elections. We find support for these notions in all seven cases, across these seven elections, using four different survey research datasets, and four different measures of White identity. Comparisons with other presidential elections show that White identity did not significantly affect mono-racial elections. Furthermore, we find the White identity and racial resentment results to be very similar in terms of their robustness and apparent effect sizes. This indicates in-group evaluations, and those that focus on out-groups, operate independently of one another.     

Do Means of Program Delivery and Distributional Consequences Affect Policy Support? Experimental Evidence About the Sources of Citizens’ Policy Opinions

Political Behavior - Recent scholarship argues that citizens’ support for specific government programs in the United States is affected by the means through which benefits are delivered as...     

Housing prices and wealth inequality in Western Europe

Abstract

Comparative political economy (CPE) has robustly examined the political and institutional determinants of income inequality. However, the study of wealth, which is more unequally distributed than income, has been largely understudied within CPE. Using new data from the World Income Database (WID), this article examines how economic, political and institutional dynamics shape wealth-to-income ratios within Western European and OECD countries. It is found that the political and institutional determinants that affect income inequality have no short- or long-run effects on the wealth-to-income ratio. Rather, the rise in wealth-to-income ratios is driven by rising housing prices, as well as price changes in other financial assets, not home ownership or national saving rates. The article concludes by examining how the changing dynamics of housing prices and wealth inequality will increasingly shape intergenerational – and associated class-based – political conflict in Western Europe.     

American political development and new challenges of causal inference

Public Choice - Members of the subfield of American Political Development (APD), like other political scientists, are confronting the identification revolution in the social sciences. They are...     

Why is basic service access worse in slums? A synthesis of obstacles

Many residents of urban areas face joint obstacles to basic service access, but these barriers are more prevalent and severe in slum settlements. Analyses of obstacles have typically been conducted in a piecemeal rather than synthetic framework and have focused on access to single services rather than the range of services needed to support household welfare. By contrast, this study uses data from fieldwork in four slum settlements situated in Hyderabad, India to develop a typology synthesising the obstacles – economic, spatial, social, institutional, and political – to the full range of service access desired by residents. Economic differences explain little of the access deficit within this population. While social and institutional obstacles are more likely to explain slum formation and residence over the long term, variation in spatial and political factors present the most acute short-term access barriers. The article concludes by suggesting the most promising means for slum residents and supporting stakeholders to overcome multi-faceted obstacles.     

With Revolutionary Battery Tech,We Can Shift Global Energy To Renewables

Inventor and investor Bill Joy describes a breakthrough technology that can speed the de‐carbonization of the planet.     

COMMANDING CONFIDENCE

<正>Economic strength and bold leadership typify modern ChinaPrior to China's reform and opening up,there were often fierce debates between senior Chinese policymakers on whether a new policy or reform indicated that"politics was in command"or conversely,"economics."While these terms are politically archaic today,reflecting on them briefly can provide a useful rubric for     

Russian 1998–2007 TFP decomposed: some inspiration emerging from inherited Soviet legacy

Using a recently developed stochastic Translog production function frontier model, technical inefficiency, technological progress and returns to scale are examined during Russia’s 1998–2007 cyclical expansion at the branch level including both the market and non-market economy. The service sector plus high skill-intensive goods production is shown to be relatively more efficient than traditional Soviet era goods sectors. Technical efficiency decreases markedly over the expansion while technological progress is quite high (23 %) suggesting an expanding frontier leaving many branches behind as the economy adjusts away from the early transition era. Much greater attention to human capital policies are suggested to foster intensive growth in an environment of low oil and gas prices.     

Body Politics with Feeling: The Power of the Clothesline Project

The Clothesline Project uses t-shirt art to address the issue of violence against women. Others have argued that the Clothesline Project empowers women in general and female victims of violence in particular. In this article we attempt to deepen this argument, first, by tying it to the existing "faces of power" literature. Using this literature, we argue that the Clothesline Project empowers by creating a public space for political action, offering an alternative communicative medium, educating in a context of dismissal and silence, and contributing to social and cultural transformation. Second, we develop the notion of affective power and argue that it amplifies the practical power of the Clothesline Project.