What is Issue Ownership and How Should We Measure It?

Recently, the concept of issue ownership has attracted increasing attention by students of electoral behaviour as well as party competition. However, both the definition and measurement of issue ownership—often drawn from Petrocik’s seminal 1996-article—is unclear. This constitutes a serious drawback to the further development and understanding of issue ownership itself and its purported effects. The paper addresses these problems by, first, establishing a definition of issue ownership at the individual level. On this basis, the standard ‘which party is best at handling issue X’ measure of issue ownership is assessed. The analyses using experiments embedded in a nationally representative panel survey indicate that the measure lacks validity and is partially redundant. Consequently, its replacement with a better performing alternative is recommended.     

Judging the “Vapid and Hollow Charade”: Citizen Evaluations and the Candor of U.S. Supreme Court Nominees

Supreme Court confirmation hearings have been famously called a “vapid and hollow charade” by Elena Kagan. Indeed, perceptions of nominees’ refusal to answer questions about pending cases, prominent political issues, or give any hint of their ideological leanings have become a cornerstone of the modern confirmation process. We investigate the extent to which this reticence to speak of their ideological views, or candor, influences how individuals evaluate the nominee. To this end, we present the results of a survey experiment which examines how support for a hypothetical Supreme Court nominee is affected by information, especially when a nominee is presented to be very forthright or very reticent in answering ideological questions during the confirmation hearings. We find that while partisan compatibility with the president is the main determinant of support for a nominee, nominees who refuse to answer ideological questions can bolster support from respondents who would not support them on partisan grounds. We supplement these findings with observational state-level support data from real nominees over the last 40 years.     

Linking Race-Based Perceptions of Gangs to Criminals and Athletes

This articles uses the work of Pyrooz and Densley as a springboard for a larger discussion of race-based perceptions from gangs to criminals to athletes. It concludes by showcasing how perceptions do not always equate with reality and the consequences of doing so.     

Is Antifa a Terrorist Group?

Starting in 2016, a number of protests and physical confrontations aimed at individuals and groups associated with right wing politics in the United States have been attributed to an ill-defined entity called “antifa”: short for anti-fascist. A high profile example took place in Charlottseville, Virginia on August 11-12, 2017. During two days of conflict and violence, anti right wing protesters clashed with right wing supporters. During the second day of the confrontation, a right-wing supporter drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one person and injuring 35 others. While many antifa supporters see it as a defense against right wing extremism, some on the right view supporters instead as terrorists. I tackle these issues in this essay by applying the guidelines of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to determine whether the actions by antifa supporters during the Charlottesville incident consitute terrrorism. I conclude that while the events share many characteristics of terrorist attacks, they do not include all of the elements of terrorism required by the GTD. I also question whether antifa can be considered to constitute a “group” at this point in time. My essay highlights how complicated it is to distinghish terrorism from other forms of illegal violence.     

Antifa,Street Gangs,and the Importance of Group Processes

This essay reviews David Pyrooz and James Densley’s “On Public Protest, Violence, and Street Gangs” and raises new questions about the ways in which Antifa is similar to and different from social movements; the processes by which “factions within Antifa” become gangs; and the dynamic nature of relationships and interactions between and among violent and non-violent segments. It concludes with a note about the everchanging nature of social life and importance of flexibility in the design and execution of research in capturing this reality.     

Governing Campus Speech: a Bottom-Up Approach

I review arguments favoring bans on problematic speech (e.g., hate speech) on campus. Contrasting such calls for top-down regulation, I explore the potential for a “bottom-up approach” to campus speech governance to address vexing concerns pertaining to campus speech without violating free speech and academic freedom principles. I examine the political economy and epistemological dynamics inherent within the two forms of governance. I argue that, relative to a centralized top-down approach, a decentralized bottom-up approach to speech governance avoids political dynamics that bend toward the inappropriate use of power. Further, I argue that a bottom-up approach leaves the discursive space contestable, and therefore more open to new discovery and correction. Recognizing that a bottom up approach is no panacea, I also consider open questions and concerns that warrant further inquiry.     

A Psychological Inquiry into Totalitarianism: Erich Fromm’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Escape from Freedom</Emphasis>

Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) charts the growth and decline of freedom and selfawareness in the West from the Middle Ages to modern times, when people sought refuge from insecurity and responsibility in totalitarian movements, such as Nazism and Fascism. In contrast to the thesis that Escape from Freedom is evidence of “The Americanization of a European Intellectual,” Fromm wrote it because freedom, or the lack of it, was an acute problem in Nazi Germany, not America. His language and concepts were formed and fused during the crucial ideological and intellectual struggles of a specific, wretched moment in German history, the rise and triumph of Nazism; hence, he waged a Kulturkampf against Nazi barbarism to save Western humanist civilization.     

The Incidental Fertility Effects of School Condom Distribution Programs

While the fertility effects of improving teenagers’ access to contraception are theoretically ambiguous, most empirical work has shown that access decreases teen fertility. In this paper, we consider the fertility effects of access to condoms—a method of contraception not considered in prior work. We exploit variation across counties and across time in teenagers’ exposure to condom distribution programs in schools. We find that access to condoms in schools increases teen fertility by about 12 percent. The results suggest that the effects of condom access varied significantly across different programs; the positive fertility estimates are driven by communities where condoms are provided without mandated counseling. Programs that mandated counseling have zero or negative fertility effects, but estimates on these counties are less robust across specifications.