Shelter Poverty in Ohio: An Alternative Analysis of Rental Housing Affordability

ABSTRACT

In the United States, housing is most commonly considered unaffordable when a household spends more than 30% of income on housing and utilities. Although easy to calculate, it fails to account for how other categories of essential expenses affect income available to spend on housing. This article compares the ratio-based approach with shelter poverty, a measure that accounts for these elements, evaluating differences in results between the two methods among renters in Ohio. Shelter poverty identifies a higher rate of households in economic distress due to housing market conditions. Further, the average “affordability gap” is four times higher using the shelter poverty than with the 30% threshold. Relative to shelter poverty, the ratio method underestimates the unaffordability of rental housing in economically distressed areas, as measured by median household income, and modestly overestimates it in high-income areas.     

Reconsidering individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.     

The Power of the State: How Postcards from the State Increased Registration and Turnout in Pennsylvania

Political Behavior - Unlike citizens in nearly all other democracies, most U.S. citizens bear the responsibility for registering to vote. We test whether states can help citizens overcome the...     

The Social Context of Woman-to-Woman Intimate Partner Abuse (WWIPA)

Forty women who had been in abusive adult, intimate relationships with other women were interviewed. Their life experiences leading up to these abusive relationships were qualitatively examined to determine how heterosexism created a social context in which women were left vulnerable to abuse and dependent on their abusers. Childhood abuse, negative coming out experiences, lack of a queer community, and substance/alcohol abuse contributed to survivors’ vulnerability to abuse by making them socially isolated from a support system and dependent on their partners to reconstruct a sense of family.